The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Read online

  She delicately ran her finger over the place on the back of her neck where Jack had kissed her. The spot burned, like the pain in her chest that made it hurt to breathe. To move. To think. So instead, Viviane simply lay in her mother’s dahlia bed watching the flames against the sky and exhaling whenever she heard Jack’s furtive whisper.

  Gabe watched as Viviane and that other guy — whoever the hell he was — rounded up the road leading to the reservoir, his heart skipping after them. Then he settled himself onto the curb outside the drugstore next to an old vagabond strumming a mandolin with long dirty fingernails. And there he remained, waiting for his heart to return and smiling politely at the vagabond’s attempt at music.

  Gabe marveled at the easy way the good Lutherans of Pinnacle Lane took to the pagan holiday, disguised as the birthday celebration of their little Portuguese matriarch, of course. In honor of Fatima Inês, neighbors danced together around the maypole with sunbeams painted on their limbs. For their daughters, they fashioned faerie wands out of wooden sticks and felt stars. The women who spent the rest of the year diligently cultivating roses for the church altar spent summer solstice eve gathering bunches of rosemary, thyme, and marjoram and nailing them to doors and entryways. For protection. Good luck. Wealth.

  Eventually the sky grew dark, and the longest day of the year finally ceded to the night. Seattle’s mayor, wearing a pair of horns on his head, lit the bonfire. The crowd roared and the fire whooshed to life, but Gabe’s attention was drawn to a fleeting Viviane. The young man Gabe didn’t know was chasing after her. Gabe stood, preparing to join the race, but with his long legs he knew he’d catch up too soon. Then what would he do? Demand an explanation?

  When he later made his way home to the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane, he passed the other guy stumbling down the hill, his clothes rumpled, his shirt buttoned wrong, his shoes untied. Gabe caught his eye and a look of self-loathing crossed his face before he hurried past.

  It took Gabe a few minutes to find Viviane. He looked in the bathtub first. When he spied her lying in the dahlia bed, shivering and half-naked in the moonlight, it took every ounce of self-control he had not to run over and wrap her in his long arms. Or to go punch that other guy’s teeth down his throat.

  The next morning Viviane awoke with streaks of dirt on her sheets and her heartache over Jack Griffith slightly more tolerable than the day before.

  Or so she told herself.

  VIVIANE TOOK A JOB behind the soda fountain at the drugstore. She was banned again from the bakery after a batch of her éclairs made the customers cry so hard, the salt from their tears ruined a week’s worth of bread. At the soda fountain, Viviane served sundaes with hot fudge and syrupy glasses of cherry Coke. When Constance Quakenbush smugly asked what she was going to do with her life, now that Jack Griffith was marrying that Laura Lovelorn girl, Viviane answered her with a soda fountain smile and a declaration: “I’m going to fly.”

  Air evacuation missions for wounded soldiers were begging for onboard nurses, and many stewardesses patriotically rallied to the call. It wasn’t that Viviane hadn’t thought about joining them. A few boys from the neighborhood had enlisted after high school. Two of them returned only a few months later in dark wood boxes, and the stars on the service flags in their parents’ windows changed from blue to gold. Viviane had known them both — Wallace Zimmer was Delilah’s brother, and Dinky Fields had sat behind Viviane in English class.

  After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she’d earnestly prayed for the boys whose bodies remained trapped in the USS Arizona and knitted gloves for trigger fingers freezing in the trenches of European soil. Viviane indulged in daydreams in which she nursed wounded soldiers back to health, calling for more bandages as the skirts of her white uniform blew in the wind and bullets flew overhead. But Viviane hadn’t any nurses’ training, so when she envisioned her life in the skies, she was hardly flying over enemy territory. When it came down to it, Viviane just wasn’t one for war; she didn’t like loud noises and often jumped when the teakettle whistled. Plus, imagine the smells.

  When she envisioned that life in the skies, she saw herself serving in-flight meals on pink trays. She’d keep her spectator shoes clean and white and her leg makeup dry. She’d smile at all the right people, flirt with all the right first-class passengers, and only occasionally go back to a pilot’s hotel room after cocktails and dancing in the lounge. The next morning she’d ignore the wedding band on the edge of the bathroom sink as she repinned the pillbox hat over her tousled curls.

  While waiting for customers one particularly slow day at the soda fountain, Viviane found an old newspaper stuffed behind the tubs of hot fudge under the counter. Next to an exposé on the discovery of the planet Pluto, there was an article about a plane that had run out of gas and landed in a wheat field near Cherokee, Wyoming. The stewardess on board said that people had come in wagons and on horseback from miles away to see the aircraft. She claimed they thought that she, the stewardess, was an angel from the sky. It was a story Viviane liked so much that she applied to be a stewardess for United Air Lines the very next day.

  The man in charge of her interview had a clipboard and a bottom lip like a bicycle tire. He asked her to lift her skirt and walk up and down the hall so he could look at her legs. He looked at her hands and examined her nails, then her hair and teeth, with a critical eye. She was prepared for this and was surprised she didn’t feel like a show horse. She’d pin-curled her hair the night before so that it floated in wispy waves at her shoulders, and she had made sure that her lipstick was just the right shade of red. At the end of the interview, the man smiled, his thick bottom lip jutting past his weak chin, and told my mother she was lucky to be so good-looking. She wondered if that was just something all homely men said.

  While she waited to hear word, Viviane spent her days in the drugstore, imagining a life that looked nothing like the one she had once planned to share with Jack. Viviane often paused in her daily activities, while adding an extra serving of whipped cream to an already-dripping ice-cream sundae or dropping cherries into a full glass of cherry Coke, and thought, If this is life without Jack, then life without Jack suits me just fine. Soon, she told herself, her days would begin and end in the blue uniform of a United Air stewardess, the tiny gold wings pinned just below the lip of her Peter Pan collar.

  But then in late August, while taking a bathroom break at the drugstore, something prompted Viviane to recall the day she had turned thirteen and awoken to a dull ache in the lower pit of her stomach; it was just strong enough, she’d thought at the time, for her mother to allow her to stay home from school. When she’d walked downstairs, however, planning to fake illness, she’d discovered that her mother already knew what was ailing her.

  This was hardly a surprise. Emilienne was always getting strange messages from equally strange places. If she dreamed of keys, a change was on its way. Dreaming of tea implied an unforeseen visitor. A birdcall from the north meant tragedy; from the west, good luck; and from the east, it announced the arrival of good love. As a child, Viviane wondered if her mother’s gifts stretched further into the supernatural realm — perhaps she could communicate with the dead. But Emilienne had dismissed Viviane’s theory with a wave of her hand.

  “Ghosts don’t exist,” she’d said, glancing furtively into the far corner of the room.

  Emilienne had handed Viviane an elastic sanitary belt, which gave her a circle of red welts around her waist. Viviane was allowed to stay home from school that day and was even given a note that excused her from gym class for the rest of the week.

  But in the two months since the night of the solstice celebration, Viviane realized, she hadn’t felt that now-familiar ache in her abdomen.

  While still in high school, Viviane had sat next to a girl whose cousin had gotten pregnant. The girl swore that the cousin had solved it by sneezing. At the time Viviane wondered why this girl had thought to tell this story to her. But now she went to the back of the store, r
ipped open a package of black pepper, grabbed a handful, and tossed it under her nose. After her eighth try, she realized that the only thing sprinkling pepper in her face was going to do was irritate a retina.

  Next Viviane tried coughing particularly hard. That gave her a sore throat. At night she spent the hours willing that dull ache to reappear — in her stomach, in the small of her back, in the tops of her thighs — and praying for a miracle.

  While at work, Viviane took trips to the bathroom six times every hour. It was after a particularly distressing break that Jack Griffith walked into the drugstore.

  Perhaps it was out of decency, or maybe it was just out of shame, but Jack had made a point of keeping away from Viviane that summer. He’d taken a job at an army supply depot along the Seattle port, working alongside women twice his age who had sons and husbands overseas. On his days off, Jack drove to the coast with his fiancée, who was spending her summer in Seattle too, to be closer to him. To Jack, the air that summer always seemed to stink of fish.

  Jack hadn’t lied when he told Viviane that Laura Lovelorn was nice. She was. She was nice and good, and Jack knew he was supposed to love her. How could he not? Everyone loved Laura Lovelorn. She was everything everyone wanted her to be. But sometimes, on their trips to the coast, Jack would forget she was even there. He’d be thinking of that last night on Pinnacle Lane, and the sun would suddenly become the moon. Its reflection would beam up at him, not from the crashing waves of the ocean, but from the still water of the reservoir. Then he’d look up and there she’d be, Laura Lovelorn, smiling her perfect smile and twirling her hair around the engagement ring on her finger. He’d think, Oh, and life would go on.

  Jack Griffith and Laura Lovelorn met at a Whitman football game in their freshman year. Not just any football game. The Whitman Missionaries were facing off against the Willamette Bearcats, the team to beat for almost nine years running. That game would turn out to be the last game for three seasons, with the war causing a league-wide cancellation of the football program. Jack had been writing a letter to Viviane — a letter that would remain forever unfinished in his top desk drawer — when he left for the stadium with his dorm-mates. They were all donning blue-and-gold sweaters and belting out the school’s fight song. Whitman, here’s to you . . .

  In the stands Jack noticed a flash of copper-colored hair three rows below him. As the miserable game continued, with the Missionaries on their way to defeat, Jack watched the girl with the copper hair cheer after each Missionary score, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold.

  Jack learned that Laura Lovelorn was a member of the Delta Gamma Society — noted by the tiny white shield she wore pinned to her sweater — and of the freshman Pep Club. She sold war stamps with the Minute Maids every Friday afternoon and was an accomplished ornamental swimmer — her routines could put famed synchronized swimmer Esther Williams herself to shame. Laura was also the daughter of a 1920 graduate whose donations to the college always surpassed even the most distinguished of other alumni. The Lovelorns lived in a large English Tudor – style mansion just outside of Spokane, where Laura’s father smoked cigars with his business associates in the library while his wife entertained their wives in the tearoom. They had a herd of award-winning Arabians and a vacation house on the coast. Most important, Jack noted, none of the Lovelorns were strange or unusual. No one could ever dare to call any of them a witch.

  Not even Jack’s father.

  When Jack walked into the drugstore that hot August day, he sat down on one of the metal stools in front of the soda fountain and ordered a cream soda. Viviane watched him sip the syrupy drink through a straw. Then Jack looked up at her and said, “I’ll never forget you.”

  My poor mother ducked her head behind the counter and vomited.

  SPRING — ALONG WITH THE ANTS, tulips, and hay fever — arrived early that next year. It was only late February, but the sun was warm on Viviane’s back. She sat on the front porch eating from the bowl of cherries resting on her lap. Handfuls of cherry pits and stems covered the floor.

  Viviane was waiting. It was hardly a rational thing to do, but it was the only option she had. For seven long months her body became something she didn’t recognize anymore, and hope moved further and further away. She could barely see it anymore; as the months wore on, it had become a minuscule dot in the distance. But still she waited. Waited for Jack to come back for her.

  The cherry tree along the side of the house had bloomed a season earlier than any other on the block. Throughout January, Viviane had watched the pink blooms scatter across the snow-covered lawn. Now the tree was bursting with cherries so red they were purple, and so large and ripe their skins were cracked, the juice leaking down the tree’s branches and soaking into the ground. All the jars of cherry jam Emilienne made, all the cherry pie they sold at the bakery, barely made a dent in the amount of fruit falling from the tree. Fortunately, cherries were the only food Viviane could manage to keep down, although the doctor — a man who only a few years before had been her pediatrician — claimed that she should no longer be experiencing nausea.

  Viviane stretched her swollen feet out in front of her; the bottoms had been perpetually lined with dirt since February, when her shoes no longer fit. Not that there’d been any reason to wear shoes. No one in the neighborhood had seen Viviane since she quit her job at the soda fountain when she could no longer pretend that her clothes still fit.

  Emilienne inserted triangles of mismatched fabrics into Viviane’s skirts and dresses. It was a fruitless attempt to get Viviane to change out of the white lace dress she’d worn for seven months straight, a dress that had turned brown and whose zipper could no longer be closed.

  Viviane could barely look at herself in the hallway mirror, let alone dress herself. Or bathe. Grimy rings collected underneath her heavy breasts and around the areolas, which had grown strangely dark and foreign. Her hair hung in sullied sticks down her back, and her hands were constantly sticky with cherry juice.

  She bathed only when her mother and Wilhelmina forced her to, when Emilienne added the day’s milk delivery to warm water in the tub and pulled Viviane into the bathroom by her dirty feet. Wilhelmina doused Viviane’s head with olive oil and lemon juice, scrubbed the grime from underneath those breasts with the strange nipples, and made sure she soaked long enough for the sticky gloss of cherry juice to come loose from the skin between her fingers.

  Viviane watched a tribe of carpenter ants surround a glob of boric acid and honey, a toxic concoction Emilienne had put out underneath the porch swing. The ants resembled black petals around a golden circle. The ants drank their fill, then made their way back to their nest in the wall. There they unknowingly poisoned their babies before dying themselves. Viviane imagined the nests as tombs, the bodies piling up.

  By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane.

  If she were to drink it, she’d drown.

  In the kitchen Emilienne feigned interest in the dish towel in her hand as Viviane slowly made her way back into the house, her steps awkward under her tremendous belly.

  “Is it getting warm out there?” Emilienne asked, her tone more gruff than she intended. Did she always sound so cold? she wondered. So stern? So heartless?

  “Hmm. A bit,” Viviane replied.

  The sound of hammer against nail could be heard coming from upstairs, where Gabe was converting one of the bedrooms into a nursery. The noise made Viviane wince.

  “Viviane —” Emilienne started.

  Viviane raised her head, and in that moment, when mother and daughter locked eyes, Emilienne felt a rush of cold fill her lungs. As her head flooded with images of last midsummer’s night — a night of broken dahlias and broken promises — Emilienne recalled
a time when love, and not longing, filled her, too, with its icy breath.

  Before Emilienne could say what was on her mind, Viviane turned and walked out of the kitchen. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  “On your way, go take a look at the damn nursery!” Emilienne shouted after her. Emilienne threw the dish towel on the counter and ran her hands miserably over her face. “I’m going to the bakery,” she murmured to no one.

  Emilienne used the bakery to hide from the horrible mess that was her daughter’s life. Pregnant, she thought disbelievingly, and with Jack Griffith’s child, no less. That talent for avoidance was something that Wilhelmina never failed to mention when Emilienne came in on her days off.

  The bakery’s success had now lasted eighteen years thanks to Emilienne’s skills as a French pâtissier and Wilhelmina Dovewolf’s clever nose for business. It was her now-partner Wilhelmina’s idea to hire local high-school boys to walk door to door through the neighborhood carrying baskets of fragrant loaves and morning buns. As business thrived, the routes became longer, and these boys — eventually known as Emilienne’s Bakery Boys — began using bicycles to make deliveries, balancing their breadbaskets on either side of the back tire. Their shiny red bikes became a familiar sight not only on Pinnacle Lane, but also well into the Ballard neighborhood and up past Phinney Ridge.

  The bakery survived the Depression by selling jams, jellies, cured meats, and eggs whenever Emilienne could get them. She kept her customers loyal by offering them store credit. Some attributed the very survival of the neighborhood to Emilienne during those tough times — if someone was hungry, they could always get bread from the bakery.

  They added wedding cakes to their pastry repertoire after beloved high-school teacher Ignatius Lux married Estelle Margolis in a small ceremony at the Lutheran church. The celebration ended with a four-tiered cake baked by Emilienne just for the occasion. Happy smiles were shared between the bride and groom, but it was the cake their guests remembered — the vanilla custard filling, the buttercream finish, the slight taste of raspberries that had surely been added to the batter. No one brought home any slices of leftover cake to place under their pillow, hoping to dream of their future mate; instead, the guests of Ignatius Lux and Estelle Margolis ate the whole cake and then had dreams of eating it again. After this wedding unmarried women woke in the night with tears in their eyes, not because they were alone, but because there wasn’t any cake left. Needless to say, the cake later became one of the bakery’s most popular items, requested for every event, large or small.