The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(20)

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.