The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (20 page)

It took several visits to the elementary-school librarian and one trek to the zoo on the hill for Gabe to figure out what kind of bat he’d caught. It was a little brown
Myotis.
And a spirited one at that. Every time Gabe reached into the cage to try to get a look at its wings, the bat bit the tips of his fingers. The bat had no such problem trusting Henry; it ate tiny grasshoppers and mosquitoes straight out of his hands. Eventually, Henry had even coaxed the bat to climb onto his outstretched finger. There the bat slept upside down, permitting Gabe to finally pull its wings open to locate the humerus and the metacarpal.

This new set of wings took several weeks to build. Basing the structure on the bat’s skeletal system, he made the wings’ frames out of oak — not a lightweight wood but with good bending qualities. Then he stretched an old piece of canvas across the frames. Again, the sounds of Gabe’s hammer and saw filled my mother’s dreams.

When the wings were finished, Gabe carried them to the roof of the woodshop. He peered down at Henry, who sat with his back against Trouver’s front legs; the bat hung upside down from Henry’s left thumb. It looked to Gabe like Henry was giving him a very large thumbs-down.

Gabe slipped his arms into long pockets he’d sewn into the fabric of each wing. He stepped to the edge of the roof. It was dark, but Gabe could see most of the neighborhood from where he stood — the lights in his neighbors’ homes shone like lighthouse beacons. His initial impulse was to jump, but after some careful thinking, Gabe stretched out his winged arms and dropped over the edge in a perfect swan dive. He’d practiced flapping many times before, perfectly emulating the wing beats of the duck, the seagull, the California brown pelican. This time he only had to flap once before the wind caught under his wings and he was flying.

He was flying!

He wasn’t actually flying. He was gliding, and only gliding until he came to a rather disappointing stop via the lilac bush at the bottom of the hill.

It was a harsh landing — the lilac bush was never the same. The wings, unfortunately, were ruined. There was a slash through one side of the canvas, and the frame was snapped. Gabe was, remarkably, unharmed.

Henry shook the bat from his thumb, waving to it as it disappeared into the night.

Gabe trudged into the house, dragging the jumble of canvas and oak behind him.

Viviane raised her eyebrows at the mess he dropped on the kitchen floor. “How many failed attempts does this make?” she asked.

“Four,” he admitted. “It’s the feathers, Vivi. I can’t imitate the feathers.”

“Yes.
That
is the problem,” she said, her tone unkind.

Gabe ignored it.

Viviane sighed. “I don’t know what’s worse — thinking yours will work or hoping hers will.”

Gabe stared at her. “Why won’t you let me help her?”

This was too much for my mother. “Because it’s stupid, Gabe!” she snapped. “It’s stupid and mean to tell a young girl that she can fly, only to have her heart, not to mention her bones, broken when she realizes she can’t.”

“So, you think it’s better she doesn’t even try?”

“I do.”

“What about what I think? I should have a say, Vivi.”

“What gives you a right to have a say in the lives of my children?” she spat.

“Are you kidding me?” Gabe’s booming steps rattled the house as he stormed around the kitchen. “I’ve been here from the very beginning. I’ve fed them, I’ve changed them. I take care of them when they’re sick. I hold them when they’re sad. I’ve done more than their own father has or ever will!”

“Is that why you’re still here? For my kids? Because it’s pathetic,” she said meanly. “It’s pathetic that, after all this time,
you’re still here.
”

Gabe grabbed Viviane’s shoulders. Neither seemed to know whether he was going to shake her or kiss her.

“Why have you stayed?” she asked softly.

Gabe dropped his hands and shook his head. “Vivi, if you don’t know that by now, then I’m not the only stupid one around here.”

He looked at her one last time before storming out the back door.

From my bedroom upstairs, I had heard the entire argument. My hands were pressed against my mouth in disbelief. No one ever yelled in our house. Still vibrating from the shock of the slammed door, I ran downstairs. “You’re not going after him?” I asked my mother with alarm.

When she spoke, it was just a whisper. “Let him go, Ava,” she said. “It’s for the best.”

But I couldn’t. I raced out after Gabe. At the bottom of the hill, I stood helplessly as his truck took him away.

“Please,” I called softly, “don’t leave us here alone.”

From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:

THAT MAY I SPENT MY EVENINGS
waiting for the house to fall silent with sleep so that I could make my escape to the reservoir. As I waited, I preened in my bedroom, practicing coquettish smiles in my window’s reflection and pretending to smoke cigarettes with the same careless air that Cardigan did. I imagined the boys in the neighborhood, the very ones who vehemently avoided me at the reservoir, climbing the rickety limbs of the cherry tree outside my window, whereupon I would pluck their fingers from the branches, then howl with laughter as they fell.

I imagined Widow Pie’s nephew watching me, his eyes, like fingers, leaving hot prints on my skin. I tried to leave for the reservoir around the same time each night and would feel jittery and wound up until I passed Marigold’s house. I imagined him standing faithfully in the dark behind a rhododendron bush as I passed by and cast furtive glances his way.

One night, I left one of my feathers on Marigold Pie’s front step, intending for him to find it. From behind the broken lilac bush in my yard, I watched, blushing wildly, as he opened the door. The wind lifted the feather into the air, then let it float back down gently against his face. I ran up the hill, feeling giddy and bold.

I imagined myself his bride; I pictured the white dress and the flower I’d tuck behind my right ear as the Hawaiian maidens do. I pictured a little house somewhere far from the hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane: dinners with neighbors, the husbands drinking Tom Collins in the parlor, the wives swapping recipes in the kitchen; the dog we’d have — a spaniel named Noodle. From these daydreams I always omitted my wings, mentally erased them from my shoulder blades.

In my daydreams I was always just a girl.

The more my infatuation grew, the more deeply I mourned the potential loss of the life I dreamed of. It was all too precious, too thoroughly imagined and yearned for to lose. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. My wings lost feathers.

My nightly escapes were put on hold in the middle of May when my infatuation got the best of me and I fell ill with a fever. I emerged from my bed only to go to the bathroom and with help at that. My mother spent the week piling quilts on my shivering body and heating batches of chicken noodle soup so hot her face flushed red when she leaned over the pot.

I’d never been so deliriously sick; even my waking moments were spent in dreams — nightmares in which infants turned into bloody animal bits, hallucinations in which the night sky fell into a burning ocean.

Then late one night, on the night of Pentecost, I sat up suddenly in bed, my hair plastered to my forehead, my feathers damp with sweat.

A young girl stood at my window, her back to the room. The lace on the old-fashioned white dress she wore trailed behind her, ripped and dirty. Her black hair, a matted mass of tangles, cascaded down her back. She turned to face me, and I could see the stars shining brightly through the back of her head.

She motioned for me to follow her, then stepped through the wall.

I threw back the piles of quilts and stumbled to the window. Peering outside, I could see her waiting for me in the grass below, her ghostly form shimmering silver in the moonlight. Without another thought, I grabbed my green cloak and climbed through the window and down the bare branches of the cherry tree into the yard.

The rains still hadn’t arrived. The grass was brown and dried. It crunched underfoot. The water of the bay had crept so low that the local teens could walk straight across it without the girls getting the hems of their skirts wet.

I followed my ghostly guide to the Lutheran church and through the church’s heavy double doors. The church was decorated for Pentecost with red linens and baskets of red silk chrysanthemums. There hadn’t been any fresh flowers in months. It was the first midnight service of Pentecostal Sunday that anyone could remember when deadly puddles hadn’t formed in the doorways, waiting to break a hip or fracture a pelvis. Even the little old ladies left their rain bonnets at home. Red banners waved gently from the ceiling. Someone had prepared a batch of sugar cookies dyed with food coloring that looked more orange than red. The parishioners were mingling in the narthex of the church, holding their plates of orange cookies, when I entered. I dropped my cloak to the ground and all conversation stopped at the sight of my uncovered wings.

The black-eyed ghost led me to the sanctuary, where the head of the Altar Guild, Nathaniel Sorrows, was gathering the unblessed wafers and leftover wine to store in the sacristy near the altar.

He turned and saw me, my wings exposed. He paled. For reasons even I remain unsure of, I dropped to my knees, raised my chin, and opened my mouth. For a moment he stood unmoving, possibly awestruck by the close proximity of the blooms of my lips. Then he held up a paper-thin wafer and brought it to my mouth. I reached up and touched it with my tongue.

A strange pink fire sparked and jumped from my parted lips. A sharp gasp came from the doorway of the nave where the rest of the parishioners now stood.

The fire was still dancing on my tongue when Nathaniel, regaining his senses, dropped the flaming host from his singed fingers. He stamped the flames out with his foot, instantly immortalizing the incident with a black mark on the carpet. I blinked as though emerging from a trance, then scrambled to my feet and stumbled from the church.

Cardigan Cooper remembered the next moment more vividly than any other in her life. She had been walking past the church alone, meaning to meet Jeremiah Flannery at the reservoir, when she saw me in my green cloak stumbling up the stone pathway of the church. She knew I’d been sick. Curious, she followed me inside and watched the entire scene play out from the back of the church. I ran by her as I was fleeing the nave. She grabbed the cloak I’d dropped earlier inside the church doors and joined me in my escape. We ran all the way back to my house on the hill on Pinnacle Lane, where we both dropped to the ground and lay with our pink faces turned toward the sky. Our breath made tiny clouds of condensation against the stars.

Cardigan turned to me. “Damn, girl. What was that about?”

But the dark-haired specter in the tattered white dress was there, too. She raised a transparent finger to her lips, then smiled eerily at me before fading away into the night.

I turned my feverish cheek to the grass and sighed. “I don’t know.”

By June I was a familiar face among the nightly crowd that gathered at the reservoir. Though I always wore the cloak, my initial visit and exposure had left its impression. So had my fevered visit to the church. Many still stared. Some even pointed, saying, “Look! There she is!”