The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (19 page)

In my mind’s eye, I could see myself arching upward. I could see the awe on the kids’ faces. I could feel the ground fall away from me and a heavy ache in my shoulders as my wings lifted me up into the night. For a moment the act of flight seemed possible.

The sky suddenly looked so vast.

And I suddenly felt so small.

My wings opened and closed uselessly once or twice more before I stepped away from the ledge. “I can’t,” I said, my teeth chattering as much from the cold as from the adrenaline rushing through me.

Cardigan smiled. A real smile this time. She stepped toward me and rubbed my arms to warm them. “I know,” she said kindly.

Rowe breathed an exasperated sigh of relief.

A girl in the crowd piped up. “What are they for, then?”

For?
I didn’t want to think about what my wings were
for
, so I showed off my one winged trick instead, knocking down a beer-can pyramid with a flap.

Not long after that, the small crowd dispersed, until it was just me, my wings, Cardigan, and Rowe.

“Wasn’t that fun?” Cardigan exclaimed excitedly. “You should have seen their faces, Ava!” She laughed.

I glared. “How could you do that?”

Cardigan stopped laughing. She twisted her pretty hair around her finger nervously. “Well, I just thought . . .” Cardigan put her hands on her hips. “Look, you wanted to meet people, right? Now everyone knows you! You don’t have to hide anymore.”

“Are you kidding?” I was yelling now. “I’m lucky they didn’t try to burn me at the stake!”

“Okay, I get it. Jeez, will you cool it already?”

“That was possibly the most selfish thing you’ve ever done, sis,” Rowe offered.

“Selfish!” Cardigan spat. “I did it for her!”

“And how is it that you got to be the one to decide what she needed?” Rowe asked.

Cardigan opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Stay out of this, Rowe,” she finally muttered.

I threw up my hands in disgust. “I’m going home,” I said, and stormed off, leaving Rowe and Cardigan to run to catch up to me.

It was quiet on the way home — Rowe walked between me and Cardigan.

When we reached my house, Rowe said to us, “You two need to sort this out.” To me, he said, “Ava, I’m glad you c-came. Truly, it was a spectacular night. T-terrifying, sure. But spectacular.” Then he made a sharp right toward his house.

Cardigan and I watched Rowe walk away before turning to face each other. Cardigan sighed. “Listen, I thought I was doing you a favor, getting your wings out into the open, so to speak. Cross my heart I did. I wanted them to see that you’re nothing to be afraid of.”

I looked out at the quiet neighborhood around us. It all seemed so simple, so harmless under the night sky. “I would’ve liked just one night. One night to be . . . normal. To just be a girl.”

“But you’re more than that. When are you gonna realize that that’s pretty swell, too?” She threw her arms around me in a tight hug. “Will you come out with us again? Please say yes.”

I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”

Cardigan smiled. “Okay, but you know you don’t have to wear the harness or anything now, right? Unless you want to, that is.”

“I think — I think I do, honestly. Well, at least I want to keep wearing the cloak.”

“But why?”

I shrugged. “I like pretending to be normal.”

Cardigan cocked her head and studied me thoughtfully. “I never thought about how hard it must be for you. Guess I am pretty selfish.” She snorted. “Just don’t tell Rowe he’s right. He’ll never let me forget it.” She smiled. “Hey, where is that cloak anyway?”

I groaned. “I forgot it at the reservoir.”

“Well, let’s go get it.” Cardigan looped her arm through mine.

I thought for a moment. “You know what? Go home. I’ll go get it myself.”

Cardigan hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Cardigan hugged me again before running home.

Now that I was alone, I felt more afraid than free; the dark seemed more formidable. I took a deep breath and reminded myself of all the times I’d wished I were out here instead of in my room. Still, I quickened my pace and pretended that my mother was standing on our front porch, watching over me.

By the time I reached the reservoir, the deep blue of the night sky had lightened — the color now diluted with specks of white clouds. Still, the shadows of the leafless trees danced eerily on the water. A birdcall became a woman’s scream. A dog’s howl became a cry of warning, the wind in my feathers, the hand of a ghost.

I found the cloak and harness — just where I’d dropped them — grabbed them, and ran, keeping my wings folded tightly against my back to keep them from slowing me down. It wasn’t until I passed the drugstore where my mother once worked that I slowed to a walk. At my grandmother’s bakery, I paused briefly and ran my fingers over the script on the window.

Wisps of orange and red were making their way across the blue sky, and I realized with a happy start that I had been out all night and hadn’t gotten caught. I let out a giddy little laugh and skipped toward home, feeling miraculously like a normal teenager.

From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:

“WHAT’S HIS NAME?”
I asked. Cardigan and I sat in my bedroom, awaiting the arrival of night and my freedom. In the days following my first escape, my trips to the reservoir continued, and I began to catch on to the things other teenagers took for granted. I learned, for example, how to smoke with a cigarette holder balanced between my fingers and how to paint in my eyebrows using black eyeliner. Through Cardigan, I learned which of the high-school boys knew what to do once they got a girl alone (answer: none), how many of the girls were sincere in their kindness (answer: very few, especially the candy stripers), and what sort of stir the arrival of Marigold Pie’s nephew had caused in the neighborhood.

Cardigan thought for a moment as she studied the deep-red polish she’d just applied to her nails. “Nathaniel Sorrows.”

I repeated his name, softly, under my breath. I liked the way it felt in my mouth. I saved it on the tip of my tongue to use later, when I wanted to hear my voice wrap itself around the syllables. Na-than-iel Sor-rows. In the middle of the night — when the neighborhood cats mated in the yard or when Trouver ran in his dreams — I would awake, calling out his name.

“What do you think about him?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t give me away. I stole a peek at Cardigan, still busy admiring her nails, and was grateful that her self-absorption made her deaf to the increased beat of my heart. I never told Cardigan about my encounter with him. I wasn’t sure why, but every time I thought of telling her, some impulse held me back. Maybe I felt that I’d finally earned the right to a secret, something to keep from even my best friend. Just like any other normal girl.

Cardigan blew on her nails. “He seems kinda square. Cute, though.”

I nodded, lost in thought. I found it odd that this stranger affected me so. He was attractive, sure. But was that it? When he’d asked to touch my wings, I wanted to say yes. So I did. And afterward, as I lay in bed, I could still feel the warmth of his fingers on the tips of my wings.

My mother often suffered extended bouts of melancholy, times when her thoughts of Jack Griffith would not dissolve with a sigh or a shake of the head. In bed she would think of that solstice night beneath the dahlias and Jack’s chest, white in the moonlight, until her skin tingled. She flushed thinking of his mouth moving across her collarbone, his hand pressed hotly against hers, their palms slick with mingled sweat. Like warm wax, the memory of his touch melted on her thighs, dripped down her leg.

For several nights’ running, she would dream of him: his smile revealing the gap between his incisors, his hands clasping a bouquet of flowers — all wilted but for the daffodil, the symbol for unrequited love. She would awake with tears in her hair. Before bed, she drank cups of tea made from the crushed dried leaves of California poppies, which Wilhelmina swore could cure any type of insomnia. Only then could she sleep, a dark sleep of empty hallways and locked doors.

When that didn’t work, Viviane did the laundry. On those nights when sleep proved impossible, she sat deep in the basement, lulled by the lazy dance of the towels in the dryer. She loved the smell of the detergent, the rumble of the machine, and the warmth of the sheets when they emerged. But more than anything else, she loved the satisfaction of removing a stain: she loved how, with a little hand soap or a drop of bleach, she could remove a pen leak from a shirt pocket, a lipstick mark from a sleeve, or a rust stain from a lace curtain. Blood was the best; how satisfying it was to remove a drop of blood from a white shirt, a glove, or a pair of women’s underwear. How satisfying to watch the red slowly fade from the fabric, leaving it clean once again with no sign of having ever been anything but white.

There remains only one photograph of my mother in her youth. My grandmother was hardly one for capturing childhood memories. Gabe found the photo pressed between the pages of an old book on dragonflies. He kept it hidden in a box he’d carved from a block of cedar. I recall seeing it once when snooping through the woodshop when I was a child.

The photograph, yellow and cracking sharply along the edges, was taken when Viviane was still Jack’s girl and Gabe had yet to arrive at our front door. The picture was, in fact, of Viviane and Jack. Viviane’s mouth was open wide in laughter, and Jack was looking at her in such a way that made it obvious: Jack had truly loved Viviane.

Gabe often compared the laughing Viviane in the picture to the Viviane who found solace in the laundry room and with cups of tea and busy housework, the Viviane who’d spent the last fifteen years waiting for Jack to come back for her. How the pain she carried didn’t knock her to the ground, he never knew; that it didn’t only made him love her more fiercely.