The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (9 page)

THE MORNING OF THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
found Viviane in the bathtub, her arms wrapped around her knees. The water splashing from the silver faucet was scalding hot. She filled the bathtub as high as she could, nonetheless, watching her breasts and the rounded points of her knees turn bright pink in the steam.

She let herself slip under the water and opened her mouth, thinking she might swallow the bathwater in one gulp and sink to the bottom. It was a weak moment and only lasted until her cheeks filled. She sat up, choking on mouthfuls of hot, body-soiled water.

It had taken only two dismal months for Jack’s promised daily letters to falter to three a week, and then two, and then none at all. By June Viviane hadn’t heard from Jack in five months, one week, and three days. The one time Viviane tried phoning him, she was told Jack Griffith was out, but the dorm mother swore to tell him she’d called. Whether she actually did, Viviane never got the chance to ask. Jack never called.

She spent her days trying to forget the sound of his voice, and her nights trying to remember. She spent her hours standing by the mailbox waiting for letters that did not come, sitting by a telephone that would not ring. Her mother banned her from the bakery — everything Viviane touched made the customers weep.

Yet in spite of the circumstances, Viviane was optimistic. Jack had to leave in order to come back, didn’t he? And she knew he would be back, just as she knew that some of the stars that shone bright in the sky were already dead and that she was beautiful, if only to Jack. And that’s just the way it was.

Viviane pulled the plug from the drain and wrapped the chain around the faucet, counting in her mother’s French with each turn.

“Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six.”
Viviane could only count to ten, but no matter; it didn’t take so many turns. She stepped out of the bathtub. As she wrapped a towel around her hair, Viviane glanced through the bathroom’s small window to where her mother’s newest houseguest was busy working in the yard.

Emilienne had started taking in houseguests just after the start of the war. It was the only patriotic thing she ever did. The house on the hill became a carousel of everchanging men, women, children, and animals, all needing a place to rest, sometimes for the night, sometimes longer. The longest to stay was a family of black cats. It was later rumored that these cats and their ancestors had inhabited the rooms and hallways of our house for thirty years, which only further supported speculations that my grandmother was a witch in
pâtissier
clothing. The longest-staying resident of the human variety, however, was Gabe.

Gabe was unusually tall, so had to be careful where he stood, for if he blocked the sun, his shadow could cause flowers to wither and old women to send their grandchildren inside to fetch their sweaters. Because of his height, many thought Gabe to be much older than he was. This was both a blessing and a curse.

Like most other new arrivals, Gabe’s first stop in the neighborhood was the bakery. He was drawn by the sharp scent of sourdough bread, but also by the girl standing in the shop’s open doors, the wind swirling her brown hair around her head. Viviane hadn’t been blessed with her mother’s thick black hair or green eyes. She was hardly the obvious beauty her mother was. To think Viviane was beautiful required a certain acquired taste. It was the kind of beauty perceived only through the eyes of love.

When Gabe learned that the girl from the bakery lived in the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane, he walked right up to that house with every intention of offering up his soul in return for a room. Fortunately, he didn’t have to make the offer. Emilienne took one long look at Gabe and easily decided she needed a tall handyman who could reach the light fixture on the front porch when the bulb needed changing.

He quickly proved himself to be more than just a tall man able to reach things in high places. At Emilienne’s request, he fixed the broken banister on the front porch and retiled the kitchen counters. He spent a full month sanding and waxing the wood floors — he had welts on his knees to prove it. He was told to leave the third floor as it was; no one went up there anyway.

During the first few months Gabe lived with the Lavenders, he could barely manage to be in the same room as Viviane without knocking the butter dish to the floor or breaking out in itchy red hives.

If asked, he would have shyly admitted that every improvement he made to the house he made for Viviane. Fortunately for Gabe, no one asked.

Gabe’s mother had come from a long-removed line of Romanian monarchs. She was an olive-skinned beauty with thinly fashioned eyebrows and a sturdy, hooked nose. She told her young son lavish tales about their ancestry while sitting at her vanity table and applying careful circles of rouge to her cheeks and thick swipes of blue to her eyelids.

She had moved to Hollywood with dreams of acting for Paramount Pictures alongside Clara Bow and Estelle Taylor. Instead, she found herself living near Los Angeles in a tiny studio apartment with a black widow spider infestation. How Gabe had come into the picture he never knew. On the nights she went out, she would remind Gabe to chain the door, then leave him to his empty dreams amid a fog of her velvety black perfume. When she returned, she’d rap on the door three times and Gabe would smooth his imprint from the sheets of her bed and place a sultry jazz recording on the turntable that sat in the corner of the room.

On those nights she came home, Gabe slept in the closet on a bed of moth-ridden coats and shawls, his long legs curled to his chin. He knew it was okay to come out when she switched the record to a more melancholy song. He’d emerge to find his mother sitting at her vanity, painting a red-lipsticked smile on her face before leaving again.

“Just remember,
inima˘
mea
, my heart,” she would say, “royal blood flows from our wounds.”

In the morning they’d go down to the diner on the corner, where she’d smile at the waitress and order Gabe the biggest stack of pancakes, and a coffee — black — for herself. These breakfasts always made Gabe sick, but he always managed to choke them all down. Every last bite.

Then one night the turntable never switched its tune. When Gabe finally crawled out from the closet, he found his mother in a broken heap, her royal blood in congealed pools around her head. A handful of dollar bills had been thrown to the floor, half of them sticky and red. The room filled with static as the needle on the turntable bumped again and again into the end of the record.

Gabe wrapped his mother in his arms and lifted her onto the bed. He had to swallow the vomit that rose in his throat when her head lolled unnaturally to one side. He tucked her between the sheets, propped her neck with a pillow, and curled up beside her.

He stayed with her for days. When the corpse began to smell and the putrid air of the apartment wafted out into the hallway, the other tenants started complaining and covering their noses with handkerchiefs when they passed by. After a final glance at his dead mother, Gabe finally left one night, taking nothing with him but the resolve to remember her only as she looked when she was alive. He ignored the money on the floor. He was ten years old.

Over the next few years, Gabe moved around a lot. His incredible height made people believe he was fifteen when he was ten and eighteen when he was twelve. As such, he was able to easily find work and spent a few months at a goat farm in Florida, loading grand pieces of art for a gallery in Queens, and collecting pond samples in central Oregon. For an entire year, Gabe worked as an assistant to a carpenter in New Hampshire. He lived with the carpenter and his family — two young children, a dog, and a wife.

If Gabe had been the age he looked, he would have caught on to the carpenter’s wife’s intentions: the way she offered to make him breakfast in the morning with her hand on his upper thigh, how the children always had an early bedtime the nights her husband played poker with his buddies, the laughter, the glances, the sighs. If he’d been more worldly, he wouldn’t have been so utterly shocked the night she entered his room and climbed on top of him. And he probably would have suspected something by the time she removed her robe, revealing her naked skin in the moonlight. And when she took him in her mouth, he probably wouldn’t have burst into tears, crying, “I’m thirteen!” and run out of the house, his pajama pants wrapped around his ankles.

Gabe spent the next couple of years waiting for the war to hit U.S. soil, and after December 7, 1941, he was the first to enlist, figuring the beaches of Hawaii were close enough. Once again his remarkable height and build allowed him to lie about his age without question. If asked, not one of his fellow soldiers would have guessed the tall quiet guy was only fifteen. His superiors, however, found him to be much too sensitive for battle, as well as too weak-stomached to be a medic, so they let him fight the good fight the only way he could — in the mess hall. While he served canned meat and soluble coffee, Gabe observed his fellow soldiers composing love letters to girls whose creased pictures they carried in their helmets and listened to them speak of their mothers in voices that cracked with longing. He wept every time one of them died. Gabe was discharged with fatigue after just a year in the service — it proved too exhausting to mourn so many lives.

When Gabe appeared at the Lavenders’ front door, his clothes wrinkled and two sizes too small, Emilienne encouraged him to stay as long as he liked. It wasn’t just because she needed a handyman who could reach the light fixture on the front porch. It wasn’t just because she suspected he was clearly younger than he wanted her to believe he was — a speculation that was later reinforced when she noted the way he dipped his head when someone said something appreciative to him and how he shuddered in Viviane’s presence. No, Emilienne welcomed him in because, upon opening the door, she heard a birdsong rising from the east, announcing good love’s arrival.

Viviane paid little attention to her mother’s new houseguest. She failed to notice his youthful gaze and mannerisms. She assumed — as everyone did — that he was much older (and certainly not younger!) than herself. She once called him
sir
and was confused and embarrassed by his crestfallen face. He was always polite, offering her the last piece of blackberry pie, and it was nice that he fixed the dripping bathtub faucet. And though he was hardly Jack, Viviane would even go so far as to say he was handsome. If you liked that tall, dark sort of thing.

But Viviane’s mind was hardly on her mother’s houseguest right then; rather, it was on the fact that the solstice celebration was that evening, an event that no neighborhood resident dared to miss. Most especially Jack. Or so she hoped.

The yearly celebrations of Fatima Inês de Dores’s birthday had changed since the days when the child had lived at the end of Pinnacle Lane. The gypsy woman and Chinese acrobats were a thing of the past, but the celebration hadn’t lost its magical, sumptuous ways. At night the celebration came to a grand
apogée
with a giant bonfire in the school parking lot. It was where exhausted children fell asleep — the warmth of the flames against their cotton-candied faces — where high schoolers snuck off to neck in the shadows, where forlorn lovers scribed their woes on blue-lined paper and burned them in the flames. It was a fitting place, Viviane believed, for fate to bring her and Jack back together again.

Perhaps in anticipation of the festivities, this year’s dahlias had bloomed early in a splendid array. Their maned faces filled every garden, like a parade of dancing children in their Sunday best, but none were more glorious than those in Emilienne’s garden. She created her own hybrids in fanciful colors unseen anywhere else: the deepest cerulean blue, fiery reds that faded to yellow or orange or the richest purple, a green so pale they looked white at first glance. They dwarfed the surrounding fruit trees; their colorful blooms arched over the first-floor windows of the house. But hidden by those large blooms was Emilienne’s real garden: white chrysanthemums for protection, dandelion root for a good night’s sleep, eucalyptus and marjoram for healing. There was foxglove, ginger, heather, and mint. The poisonous belladonna. The capricious peony. And lavender. One could never have enough lavender.

Emilienne watched her daughter come into the garden through the rusted iron gate. As Viviane made her way down the path toward her mother, she ducked under the swaying blossoms and batted at them playfully. She was wearing a white lace dress, and in her hair was a garland she’d made in preparation for
la fête.
She’d spent hours carefully weaving the stems together and tying strands of ribbon to hang down her back.

Viviane looked, Emilienne noted silently, like a bride on her wedding day.

“What are you dressed up for?” Emilienne was troubled by the faraway look in Viviane’s eyes. Lately the only expression Viviane wore was one of misery and longing. This was a different look, Emilienne noted. There was some excitement there, some hope.

Viviane smiled. “Solstice.”

“Ah.” Emilienne stood, brushing the dirt from her knees. “You should ask Gabe to go with you.” Emilienne cringed at her attempt to speak casually with her daughter — it was a skill she’d never mastered.

Viviane was too distracted to notice. “Who?”

“Our guest,” Emilienne pointed to where Gabe was sanding the new railing he’d recently installed on the back porch. “Go ask him,” Emilienne commanded. “It would be polite.”

“Fine.” Viviane sighed. “But I’m going there to meet Jack.”

Emilienne raised her eyebrows. “And you know he’ll be there, how?”

“I just know.”

The glow in her daughter’s eyes left a taste like metal in Emilienne’s mouth.

She reached out and tucked a sprig of lavender into the crown of flowers on Viviane’s head. “For luck,” she said, a bit more gruffly than she meant to.

Without another word, Viviane dreamily skipped back down the cobble path.

Viviane noticed the way the neighbors looked at her mother when they went into the bakery to buy a loaf of bread, noticed how they flinched if her hand touched theirs when she gave back their change. She knew the neighbors thought her mother was strange.