The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(23)

So she did.

She ran past the booths of pannekaken, krumkake, and fattigmann, and the overcooked ears of yellow corn. She ran past the tainted tents of turquoise and white, the plain-faced girls of the high school’s Key Club and their mothers selling overcooked pies for the Veterans Hospital downtown. She ran past the drunken musicians, the boxes of flea-bitten kittens, the wretched inferno in the school parking lot.

She ran until the night was a blur of blue and black and watery reflections and copper-colored hair. She ran until she reached her mother’s garden behind her house, and there she discovered that Jack had been keeping up behind her the whole time.

Jack stood panting with his hands on his knees.

“This isn’t what was supposed to happen,” Viviane said quietly. “You were supposed to come back for me. Not come back with someone else.”

Jack looked away, squinted up at the glare of the streetlight. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, reconsidered what he was going to say. “She’s nice. You’d like her —”

Viviane stood and turned away from him, looking up at the glow from a window in her house. “I’m giving you to the count of ten to leave,” she said. “Un, deux.”

He stepped closer. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

“Trois, quatre, cinq.” She bit the inside of her lip.

“Six, sept, huit.” She closed her eyes at the kiss Jack placed on her neck.

“Neuf, dix.” Viviane could only count to ten in French. She allowed herself ten tears, one for each step it took for her to lay down beneath her mother’s dahlias, her face to the sky. She removed her crown of flowers and threw it on the ground.

She was only vaguely surprised when Jack sat down beside her, smashing the garland she’d spent hours making.

Jack winced. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling it out from under him and trying to straighten the bent flowers.

Viviane grabbed it from him and flung it back to the ground. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

What happened next neither of them could ever fully explain. Viviane felt as if she were watching it happen to someone else, someone else’s clothing being undone, someone else’s lips on Jack’s skin, someone else’s hands on his chest. Her thoughts were consumed only with the taste of his mouth and his fingers catching in the knots in her hair. And when he rolled over the garland for the second time that night, she straddled his hips with her own and arched her neck to the sky.

The mulch of the garden felt cool beneath Viviane’s head. It gave off a rich, potent stench that clung to the inside of her nostrils. The largest dahlia in her mother’s collection was called the Dauntless, a bright red flower shaped like a pom-pom and the size of a dinner plate. Viviane reached up and snapped it off at the stem — then tossed it back and forth, amazed by how big it was, yet so fragile she could so easily pluck it right off with her fingers.

Viviane’s white dress hung loosely off her shoulders, leaving her breasts exposed to the moonlight. The skirt had twisted around her waist. She traced the smudges of dirt on her shoulders and fingered the ripped lace on the hem, noting without emotion — how could she possibly feel anything now that she’d lost Jack? — that she was dressed as a bride both the first time she saw Jack, as well as what would probably be the last. There must be some irony in that, though it did little to soothe Viviane’s downtrodden heart.

Viviane could still see the orange flames of the bonfire against the dark sky. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the sounds of the celebration continuing without her: the circled groups of husbands, their voices resounding from a few too many celebratory beers, their wives warning the children to keep away from the fire. If she held her breath, she could hear Jack Griffith whisper in his fiancée’s ear. She exhaled loudly.

Viviane considered herself a rational woman. She was a Virgo. She was used to solving problems, even if it meant she spent far too much time mulling things over in the bathtub. But this. This didn’t make any sense; when she tried to envision her life without Jack or his without her, all she could think of were platypuses. What was a platypus but a kind of duck with fur? The whole idea of it was ridiculous and wrong.

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.