The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(24)

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.