The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (27 page)

After Beatrix Griffith disappeared, Laura moved away from her beloved eastern Washington — with its hot summers and snowy winters — to live with her husband in Seattle, a town known for its year-round rains. She was quickly welcomed into the neighborhood, due mainly to her themed cocktail parties and sweet disposition. She could always be counted on to buy at least one box of shortbread cookies from the local Girl Scout troop, never left the house without her white gloves, never served her husband a meal of leftover casserole, always did everything she was supposed to do. When Jack didn’t want any children, she told the girls at the hospital where she volunteered that she and Jack needed to take care of his father before they started a family of their own. After John Griffith died, she told them she and Jack wanted to travel the world instead, visit the pyramids in Egypt, walk the boot-shaped coastline of Italy. Then when Jack moved to the separate bedroom on the other side of the house, she stopped telling them anything at all.

It might have been clear to anyone else that Jack was unhappy — that, perhaps, he had never even loved her at all — but Laura refused to see it. She didn’t see the way he avoided the bakery, didn’t see how his eyes squinted shut whenever they passed Pinnacle Lane. She didn’t notice that he rarely spoke to anyone during their infamous parties, that while she served guests from trays of cheese balls and deviled eggs, Jack spent most of the night standing in the corner, smiling blandly while the ice melted in his highball glass. She didn’t see it because when it came to love, she saw what she wanted to see. Laura had always been a good wife. The years she’d been married to Jack Griffith, she’d spent in a love-induced fog, believing that Jack was happy with the life they’d created together and, more significant, that he loved her.

On this summer solstice, Laura Lovelorn returned home late in the evening to find her husband sitting in the dark, an empty bottle clutched in his hands, his breath reeking of bourbon.

“I’m a fool, Laura,” he blubbered. “I lost the love of my life tonight.”

Laura leaned down to stroke her husband’s hair. “What are you talking about, sweetie? I’m right here.” She kissed his forehead.

Jack looked up at her, blinking. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

Laura smiled sweetly. “Who, then?”

“Viviane. Viviane Lavender.”

And as Jack continued to blubber on about a secret life, a life of love and betrayal, the fog finally lifted from Laura’s eyes.

“Oh,” Laura had whispered. “Oh my.”

When he was finished, she walked into the bedroom where she’d slept alone now for so many years. She pulled her suitcase from the closet and packed her belongings, carefully choosing the items she’d take with her and deciding which ones would have to stay until later. She dragged her suitcase out into the hall and told Jack she was leaving him. He only waved at her halfheartedly with his bottle, which told Laura how very wrong she’d been. Jack Griffith had never loved her, not as she thought he had and never as he loved Viviane Lavender.

Laura threw the heavy suitcase into the back of the car and backed out of the driveway. Turning out onto the street, she saw the flashing lights and swarms of people filling the end of Pinnacle Lane. She pulled the car to the side of the road and got out, shielding her eyes from the heavy current of rain pouring from the sky.

She saw Viviane Lavender’s son before she’d even had time to find out what had happened. Looking at him, she could only shake her head. Henry was a mirror image of Jack Griffith in his former years. Yet there was a look behind the boy’s eyes that was much different from anything Laura ever saw in Jack’s. It was as if Henry carried the world, misshapen and imperfect, in his lovely wide pupils.

How could she not have seen it?

Laura grabbed Wilhelmina’s hand in her own. “I just want to help,” she said. Wilhelmina peered over Laura’s shoulder at the crowd. “Help, huh? Well, we might need a bit of that.”

In the bakery Wilhelmina flipped the switch on the coffee pot. She pulled the porcelain cups and saucers from the cupboard, lining them up on the front counter, each cup balanced on its particular plate. The coffee would have to do until she got the oven started. Penelope sent Zeb off for supplies as Wilhelmina began feeding the brick oven with logs of dried eucalyptus, dismissing any ideas for pastries or other desserts. What everybody needed was bread. Hearty, sustainable bread warm from the oven, with thick crusts on the outside and soft on the inside, topped with butter, honey, or hazelnut spread.

When Zeb returned, Wilhelmina pointed him to the hand mill and set him to work grinding the fresh spelt, rye, and red wheat they would use to make
pain de campagne.
She gave Rowe and Cardigan the job of pounding the dough for the baguettes and showed Laura Lovelorn how to tend the fire.

It took all night for the bakery to fill with the aroma of freshly baked bread, but, no matter, no one had any intention of leaving. Besides, where would they go? Every once in a while, they would look up from their particular tasks, their faces smudged with flour, and catch in another’s eyes the look of despair. Then Trouver would shift in his sleep or Henry would start to hum, and the bakers would return to their work.

Outside, the crowd around Pinnacle Lane grew larger, the wet street bulging with neighbors who’d heard of the attack. For reasons they themselves couldn’t fully explain, each felt compelled to pay their respects. They battled the pelting rain in their Oldsmobile Sedans, their Studebaker Starliners, their Ford Model B pickups with the family dog sniffing the wet air in the bed of the truck. They gathered around Pinnacle Lane, spilling down the street and into the neighboring yards. They kept clear the place in the street stained by the black mark that was once Nathaniel Sorrows. They came with their children, their wives and husbands, their parents. They came dressed as if coming to church or to a funeral, or as if coming straight from bed, which most of them did. They came with tents and umbrellas, hats and gloves; they came with nothing at all, not even a jacket to protect them from the rain. By dawn a donation box had been set on the counter at the bakery, and people solemnly offered their spare change in exchange for a slice of bread, a warm croissant. The rain continued to fall. And still, the people kept coming.

Some brought with them their Bibles — the passages they thought most poignant underlined in red. Some sat in silent circles and walked their fingers around strands of beads in unplanned unison. Others brought along mats to kneel on as soothing chants rose from their throats. As water poured over their upturned faces, their prayers were sent to the sky. They weren’t prayers for forgiveness or salvation. They weren’t sent in gratitude for the angel walking among the wretched human race. They weren’t for the soul of a deformed and cursed half-human creature who lived at the end of Pinnacle Lane. They were, quite simply, prayers said for a girl.

For me.

Viviane opened her eyes to a white hospital room. The morning sun peeked mildly through the bare window. She stretched out her legs, cramped from spending the night tucked beneath the metal folding chair, and glanced up at the nurse quietly entering the room. I moaned softly from my hospital bed. Thick, large bandages covered the gaping wounds on my back; a needle dripped cold liquid into my arm. A thick strip of gauze had been wrapped around my head. Emilienne was asleep in another chair next to the bed, her head leaning against the wall, her open mouth tipped toward the ceiling.

“There’s coffee in the waiting room,” the nurse offered. “Just made a fresh pot.”

My mother closed her eyes as the nurse pulled back the bandages, revealing the gruesome, haphazard gashes across my shoulder blades. She swallowed a sudden wave of nausea. “No. I’m fine.”

The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Honey, after the night you’ve had, nobody would blame you for not being fine. Go get some fresh air. We’ll still be here when you come back.”

In the waiting room, Viviane found the pot of coffee, as well as Gabe asleep in a chair, his chin resting against his chest. With his long legs stretched out in front of him, his feet nearly reached the windows across the room.

Viviane dropped into the seat beside him, noting the days’ worth of stubble across his cheek, the lines of worry newly formed around his mouth. One hand rested in his lap; the other on the chair’s armrest, the fingers curled away from the palm as if waiting for Viviane to lace her fingers with his. Viviane looked at the hand, the jagged fingernails, the white calluses, the cuticles permanently lined in black. She found his life line, the long crevice pointing away from his thumb, a nod to the years Gabe had spent traveling before coming to Seattle. The arc in the head line meant a creative mind, the star at the base of the fate line meant success. His heart line was long and curved, and she traced it with her eyes over and over again. A person with a curved heart line was a person capable of great warmth and kindness, a person willing to give their whole selves to love, no matter the cost.

Viviane reached over and threaded her fingers through Gabe’s.
If I’d only looked down sooner
, she thought,
I would have seen that everything I ever needed was here, in this hand.

Gabe’s eyes fluttered open at Viviane’s touch. He smiled wearily, wrapping his fingers around hers. “How’s our girl?” he asked.

“Alive.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Is it? I thought I was protecting her. It never dawned on me that she could live like everyone else. Now that I know she can, it feels like it’s too late.”

Gabe pulled Viviane to him. “Henry?” she asked.

“With Wilhelmina,” he replied. “Emilienne?”

“With Ava. Hasn’t left her side since last night.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

Viviane nodded. A moment passed. “That man. The one I almost hit with the truck? It was him, wasn’t it?” With a shudder, she remembered the monstrous ghosts in the road.

Gabe shook his head. “I can’t be sure. But nobody’s seen him. They found poor Marigold Pie up in one of the bedrooms. She’d been drugged. For how long, no one seems sure. Months maybe.”

Viviane sighed. “I feel like the whole world’s been tipped on its axis. Just walking upright feels like too much today.”

Gabe pulled her closer. “You just lean on me, Vivi. I’ll keep us both upright for a while.”

Many would have typically preferred the rains to appear more gradually — say, as a warm spring shower typical of April or in the shape of a dense fog, the air clinging wet to eyelashes and nostrils. But when the rain persisted throughout the summer months and well into September, they hardly complained and instead wrapped cellophane around their good shoes to protect them from the mud along the sidewalks. They knew that rain meant green lawns, fall foliage, and chrysanthemums for the church altar on Sunday mornings. Wistful thoughts of that spring without rain came and went on occasion, when, for example, the mail carrier grew tired of sorting sodden letters, or Penelope Cooper became listless at the sight of the bakery floor streaked with mud yet again. But then that weariness would pass, and they would join their neighbors in a collected sigh of relief at the piles of wet fall leaves gathering in the street.

My mother remained at the hospital for the length of my stay. She refused to leave even for a change of clothes. After that first night, she coaxed the nurse to bring in a cot so that she could stay in the room with me. She was surprised when the nurse brought in not one, but two. She was even more surprised when she found out the other cot was for Emilienne.

Emilienne sat down on the cot before glancing up at her daughter. “What? Did you want this one?”

“No,” Viviane said, shaking her head. “I’m a little confused as to what you’re doing.”

“I’m staying as well.”

Viviane raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

“Because —” Emilienne’s voice broke. “Because I’m your mother, that’s why.”

And so it was.

WE RETURNED TO THE HOUSE
at the end of Pinnacle Lane barely three months after the summer solstice. Gabe carefully placed me on my bed, and my grandmother covered me with a quilt her
maman
made many years before. Emilienne willed herself not to weep, but I saw it in her face. The gauze hid my sutures well enough, so she didn’t have to stare at the stitchery holding my frail body together. But the bruises would not be hidden. They seeped down my sides, across my arms and hips, down the backs of my legs. And the color — so dark they weren’t purple, but red. The very color of violence.

Those deep-red bruises called to mind the faint brown mark Jack’s kiss had left on her daughter Viviane’s neck so many years ago. They also made her think of René’s lovely face after William Peyton shot it off, of the hole in Margaux’s chest where her heart once beat, and of all the scars love’s victims carry. Then she would have to leave the room.

My grandmother felt no rush to return to the bakery. She could hardly will herself to cook enough to keep her own family fed, not that anyone cared. The appetite of my whole family had dwindled enough so that each ate only when the gnawing pains of hunger fired in their bellies. And even then, they did so without gusto, taking a fork to a neighbor’s cold pan of macaroni and cheese left in the fridge. No one paid any attention to where the food came from, just that it was there.