The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (17 page)

Curious and impulsive, I dashed down the hill and ducked behind a lilac bush near the road to spy. The man walked slowly up Marigold’s front walk, taking in our quiet neighborhood. He paused for a moment, shielded his eyes from the sun, and stared up at my house at the top of the hill. Before he continued into Marigold’s house, I swore he saw me hiding there in the lilacs.

The door closed behind him, and I ran back up the hill to Cardigan, who looked bemused.

“Who do you suppose that was?” I asked breathlessly.

Cardigan shrugged. “What a dreamboat, though, don’t you think?”

I glanced back down the hill, my head reeling with the thought of this man having seen me. Could he have liked what he saw? “Oh,” I murmured, blushing. “I don’t know.”

Years ago, when Emilienne’s family was still whole and living in that tenement in Beauregard’s Manhatine, Emilienne’s
maman
spent a good deal of her time finding scraps of fabric to contribute to the quilts that were intended for her daughters’ dowries. The quilts were meant to be enclosed in elaborately hand-carved
trousseaux
, along with lace pillowcases and heavy silver flatware. They were also meant to be split fairly between three daughters, not left as an inheritance for the lone survivor, but Emilienne had long ago learned that perfection was hardly something to expect in life.

Each quilt carried a telling name, and years later each would find its way onto an appropriate bed — “Bright Hopes” for Viviane before Jack, “Broken Path” for after, “Dove in the Window” for me, and the “Crazy Quilt” for Henry.

Emilienne herself slept under a pile of plain woolen blankets.

Emilienne straightened the quilt on Henry’s bed, being careful not to disturb anything. Viviane all but ran the house those days, but occasionally Emilienne could find a menial task to fill her time and keep her mind off things she’d rather not think about. From out of the corner of her eye, she could see the faint outline of a man illuminated by the thin triangle of sun coming through the window. She’d learned over the thirty-six years since his death that the more she ignored him, the louder the ghost of René tried to speak. If Emilienne had looked at him, she would have seen the place where his mouth used to be. He seemed to be yelling right then and gesturing wildly out the window with his hands.

Instead, she gave a pillow one final thump and, with practiced immunity, stepped right through the apparition in the corner, never stopping to find out what he was trying to say this time. If she had . . . well, it’s hardly worth fretting over
if
s and
when
s.

C’est la vie
, as she might say.

Downstairs Emilienne found Henry at the dining-room table, licking frosting off a spoon.
They
were there as well. All three of them — René, who dogged her steps, along with Margaux and the canary, Pierette. And someone Emilienne had never seen before — a small, dark-haired child with thick eyebrows and chapped lips. The child ran her hand along the collection of antique teapots atop the oak hutch, her translucent fingers tracing the edges of the porcelain pots.

It wasn’t just that they were
there.
That she’d gotten used to, along with Pierette’s incessant chirping, René’s mutilated face, the hole in Margaux’s chest where her heart used to be. No, the truly awful part was that Henry was
talking with them.

Well, he was talking with René, the only one who spoke. Even if Emilienne had allowed herself to hear him, René was hardly easy to understand, what with his not having an actual mouth and all. But Henry and René didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with one another.

René would mutter something and Henry would nod, as if in agreement. “Bee in the bush and cat on the wall,” Henry said seriously around the spoonful of frosting in his mouth.

Emilienne went into the kitchen and got out a plate for a slice of the chocolate cake she’d left on the counter.

The ghost child followed her into the kitchen. With black, vacant eyes she watched Emilienne. And though Emilienne tried to block it out, she heard the child’s quiet whisper clearly: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Very few in the neighborhood then knew or remembered the story of Fatima Inês de Dores and her ship captain brother — the way the child paced the widow’s walk awaiting his return, the Communion wafer that burst into flame when it touched her tongue. Some mistook the story of the siblings for a fairy tale, even congratulating themselves for thinking up such a vivid bedtime story to tell their children. Emilienne knew better than to disparage something as powerful as a fairy tale, and she never forgot the tale of the ill-fated little girl who once roamed the hallways of the house on the hill. Or rather, it seemed, still did.

Emilienne coughed a mouthful of ashes into the air.

She wiped away the gray soot stuck to her teeth, left the cake in the kitchen, and joined Henry in the dining room, where he’d just finished his final spoonful of frosting. Henry went to his grandmother and took her face between his hands. “The Sad Man needs you to know,” he said to her.

Startled, Emilienne looked to her siblings. The Sad Man? René? But they were gone. Only the young dark-haired specter stared back at her from the corner of the room.

“Yes?” Emilienne whispered, looking into Henry’s wide eyes.

“There’s red on the floor and feathers everywhere,” he replied.

And with that, Fatima Inês faded away.

After Fatima’s visit, Henry carried on an endlessly looping conversation that sounded a bit like this:

“Henry, what do you want on your toast this morning?”

“There’s a bee in the bush!” he insisted.

“Jam? Butter? Honey?”

“And a cat on the wall!”

“What about cereal instead?”

“There’s red on the floor and feathers everywhere!”

Then he would tear around the house calling,
“Pinna hurt! Pinna hurt!”
as Trouver barked wildly behind him.

From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:

TROUVER HAD GROWN
fast into his big paws. We had hoped he’d remain small and manageable, but once he passed one hundred pounds, we knew we weren’t dealing with a Maltese or a shih tzu. Trouver was a Great Pyrenees — a purebred at that — which was quite remarkable considering he’d been found rifling through the peony bush in our backyard. His pelt resembled that of a white musk ox, and when he shed, tufts of fur the size of small rabbits blew like white tumbleweeds across the wood floors of our house.

Trouver and Henry were inseparable and often walked not dog following boy but side by side. They were walking in this way — a strange set of conjoined twins — when they strode into the woodshop where Gabe was nursing a bleeding lip after another failed attempt at flight.

Gabe had built the first set of wings out of lacquered cheesecloth stretched over a bamboo frame. When that didn’t work, he tried wicker — a weave of willow bark and madrone twigs — but each of those creations proved too heavy. Another set he made out of aluminum wire and gauze, which sent Gabe spiraling into a panicky nosedive after he launched himself off the roof of the shed.

Gabe dragged himself back into the woodshop, bleeding from the mouth and glad that only Henry, and neither my mother nor I, had witnessed that test flight. “Failure number four,” Gabe muttered, and he tossed the broken wings onto the growing trash pile in the corner of the shop. In doing so, he disturbed a bat living in the rafters of the woodshop. He followed the bat as it made its way outside, and when Gabe saw the bat’s wings beat against the night sky, Gabe realized he’d been looking for inspiration in the wrong place. He also decided he had to catch that bat.

“We need your mother’s colander,” Gabe said to Henry. “And a large supply of beetles, mosquitoes, flies, and — moths. Like that one!” Gabe reached out and grabbed a brown-winged insect in midflight. He carried it into the kitchen and placed it in an empty coffee can, the fluttery drum of its wings echoing against the tin sides. He dug through the cupboards until he found the colander. In the living room, he thumbed through the books on birds he received by mail order years before until he found what he was looking for: a short section on bats included in the back of one.

From a second-floor window, my mother watched Henry in the yard snatch moths out of the air.

Viviane suddenly recalled the day Jack left for college. She remembered the glass jar he presented her, and then watching as he made his way back down the hill, and the look of the taillights of his father’s Coupe.

There was a dragonfly inside the jar. Viviane had never seen one so close before — its green iridescent wings looked far too fragile to be capable of flight.

Wilhelmina later told Viviane the superstition about dragonflies. “It’s a saying so old I don’t think anyone knows where it came from anymore,” she said.

“How does it go?” Viviane asked.

Wilhelmina’s eyes twinkled. “Catch a dragonfly, wed within the year.”

Viviane’s dragonfly had died within the week.

Downstairs she asked Gabe, “What’s Henry doing?”

“Bats and birds share a similar wing-beat pattern,”
Gabe read from the book in his hands. He looked up at Viviane excitedly. “I’m going to catch a bat. Henry’s catching bugs to feed it.”

“Why not just catch a bird?” Viviane asked Gabe. “You can do that in the daylight.”

Gabe glanced up from his book. “I can’t replicate the feathers. I tried.”

It took three nights to catch the bat. In the end, the little mammal made its own way into an ancient rusted birdcage Gabe had found in the basement crusted with old crow and dove feathers. Every night after dinner, Henry fed insects to the bat through the bars and Gabe worked on a new set of wings.

I HAD BEEN ASLEEP
when I heard the tap of Cardigan’s finger against the windowpane. She’d climbed up the cherry tree outside my bedroom window and breathlessly confirmed what we had both assumed since the day she had kneed Jeremiah in the groin.

“One of ’em looks like a fig — a pink shriveled-up fig,” she said.