The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(27)

Emilienne picked up the keys to the bakery from the counter and made her way to the front door. Emilienne kept the keys on a leather rope worn smooth from the hours it spent hanging around her neck. They never left her — she even kept them on her pillow as she slept.

Emilienne stepped onto the porch, blinking in the spring sun. As she closed the door, the sound of Gabe’s diligent working quieted to a distant pounding. At the bakery Emilienne was always in charge. Not even Wilhelmina dared to make a decision without consulting Emilienne first. She sighed. If only that were the case at home.

What actually belonged in a nursery still remained a mystery to Gabe, but he’d managed to make a crib and placed it near the window. He was trying to decide the color for the walls when Viviane slipped into the room behind him.

“Green,” Viviane said, glancing down at the buckets of white and blue between his feet.

Gabe looked up, startled to see her. “What kind of green?” he asked.

“Light, but not lime. More like apple green. Spring green.”

Gabe nodded in agreement. “Spring green it is.”

Gabe never needed very much sleep at all and instead spent most nights the way he spent his days — working on the house, the beat of his hammer and the raking of his saw making their way into my mother’s dreams. Some nights he did no work at all and instead celebrated his renovations with creamy bottles of home-brewed beer. My mother spent those nights in a dreamless sleep.

Gabe watched as Viviane walked around the room. He was pleased to see her bathed. Gabe wasn’t sure if it had been Emilienne’s or Wilhelmina’s doing, but he hoped Viviane herself had washed the cherry juice from her hands, tied the red ribbon in her hair. Perhaps it was a sign of something good to come.

She ran her fingertips across the newly sanded crib, paused to admire the curtains in the windows. Gabe held his breath when she noticed the tiny sculpture hanging above the crib.

“Feathers,” she said, offering a vague smile.

“Well, I thought, maybe, it would be . . .” Gabe stammered, unsure how to explain what compelled him to collect discarded feathers from the neighborhood birds and hang them over the place where Viviane’s child would sleep.

Once, after a particularly wet night of celebrating, Gabe had found himself in Viviane’s room, kneeling by her bed. Even though she was miserable, even though she was filthy — her feet were encrusted in dirt, and there were circles of red juice around her frowning mouth and on the palms of her hands — he still found her beautiful. He had lightly pressed a hand to the mound of her belly. In case she were to ask him, he had thought about names for the baby. Maybe Alexandria or Elise for a girl, and if a boy, Dmitry.

As he was about to pull his hand away, he felt it: a light fluttering from beneath his hand. And though Gabe knew the common term was quickening, he could hardly keep from laughing out loud: it had felt just like wings!

Viviane smiled again. “Feathers are fine, Gabe,” she said, and walked out of the room, leaving Gabe to stumble over the fact that for the first time, Viviane Lavender had said his name. That fact filled Gabe with so much hope that he grew another two inches just to have enough room to hold it all.

Hardly a soul slept the night my mother was in labor. Nocturnal birds gathered on the lawns like pious parishioners to eat noisily, their doomed prey screaming wildly into the dark. Earlier in the day, the crows and sparrows had tormented the neighborhood with angry calls, flying into windows and after small children. Viviane, however, was unaware of the strange disturbance her upcoming delivery had brought to the neighborhood birds.

Gabe drove her to the hospital in the clunky Chevy truck he’d bought for the odds-and-ends jobs he took around town. Emilienne was still at the bakery, and there was no time.

“No time!” Viviane screamed from the passenger side of the truck, her clenched fists as tight as the ball of her belly. She squeezed her eyes shut in pain, and a slick layer of sweat gathered above her upper lip.

Gabe reached across the old truck and grabbed her hand — slightly disgusted with himself for finding pleasure in being able to touch her at such a time.

“Hold on, there, Vivi,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.”

Gabe was forced to remain in the waiting room as Viviane was whisked away by a pair of apron-clad nurses, who quickly set her up in a sterile white room before their squeaky shoes took them back down the hall.

Alone, my mother cried and screamed. Screamed for the nurses, for Jack, even for her mother — though Emilienne was hardly the type to hold her daughter’s hand or wipe her forehead with a damp cloth. And when the pain felt too great, when it felt like the contractions would split her in half, the squeaky shoes finally returned, bringing with them a cold syringe of relief.

Just before slipping into a deep twilight sleep, Viviane swore she saw giant feathers falling from the ceiling, an image she attributed to the anesthetic.

When I was born, the on-call doctor examined the forceps in his hands in bewilderment before going in search of family in the waiting room.

According to the nurses in attendance, moments after I made my entrance, I opened my eyes and pointed a pinkie finger toward the light. This was an admirable feat considering I first had to unfold a pair of speckled wings sprouting from the edges of my shoulder blades.

My twin came as a surprise to them all — most especially the doctor, who had to be rushed back for his birth. It was later debated whether or not my wings had anything to do with how Henry turned out. But that wouldn’t explain the many others like him — others who were born just as strange as Henry but without a feathery twin.