The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(29)

She brought gifts — a spinning top for me, a set of blocks for Henry. And she held me in her lap until my wings tickled her chin.

Before she left, Beatrix seized Viviane’s hand. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” she whispered.

Beatrix Griffith wasn’t always such a quiet woman. She used to be funny — spirited even — and was voted Most Outstanding Girl in her senior class. She was the one who distracted the rival football team with her wit while classmates stole the team mascot. She was the first girl in the neighborhood to cut her hair into a stylish new bob, then convinced her girlfriends to do the same once she felt the thrill of the fall air on her ears. When John Griffith came into her life, his blue eyes and firm jaw made her weak in the knees, and her friends saw a change in their fun-loving Beatrix. Before long, waiting at home for John to call was more important than attending the homecoming game. “What would I tell him if it ran late?” she’d worry, her fingers fidgeting with anxiety.

John — the son of an unsuccessful carpet salesman — worked as a laundry delivery truck driver. His illegal involvements were mere rumors, quiet whispers that followed him about like an elusive mosquito on a warm summer evening. People saw even less of Beatrix once she and John were married. When her girlfriends invited her over for tea, Beatrix always had an excuse not to come, a reason to hurry back out the door. She had to prepare dinner. John liked his promptly at six. She had to clean the house. John liked coming home to floors freshly waxed, the bathtub newly scoured. But, most important, she had to conceive a child, and John wanted a son.

Her friends stopped coming to call altogether shortly after Jack was born. What was the point? The sprightly Beatrix they once knew had long since faded away. Perhaps this was why, many years later, no one noticed when she did actually disappear. Not her neighbors or her old friends or even Emilienne, who was too busy trying to run a bakery to notice that Beatrix Griffith no longer stopped in for her weekly three loaves of bread.

Beatrix’s own husband might not have realized she was gone if he hadn’t arrived home at six and found his dinner wasn’t waiting for him on the table.

“Goddammit, Beatrix!” he called. “What the hell is this about?”

That was when he noticed that all of his wife’s belongings were gone — one side of their bedroom sat empty and bare. It looked as if she’d never lived there at all, as if John had spent the last twenty-three years merely living a half-life. He called out her name again and was surprised by how easily his big voice filled the room.

In all their years of marriage, Beatrix Griffith never once considered her husband a controlling man. Perhaps it had crossed her mind once or twice, but she’d always assumed that freedom was a sacrifice one made for love. Which was why she hadn’t batted an eye when, on the night of their wedding, her new husband closely inspected their nuptial sheets for her virginal blood. Or when he’d thrown her carefully planned meals to the dogs when the meat wasn’t prepared to his liking. No, Beatrix never considered her husband a controlling man until she heard him command their son, Jack, to break up with Viviane Lavender. Afterward, when they were alone, Beatrix took a deep breath and said, “You shouldn’t be so hard on him, dear. He’s fallen in love with her.”

John looked at her in amazement, as if shocked to learn she still had a voice at all, and said, “What kind of man falls in love?”

After an unsatisfying meal of canned cocktail sausages and a jar of peach preserves he found in the basement, John Griffith went to sleep in that half-empty room. That night he dreamed he could fly. He dreamed of the whispery kiss of clouds, cold and wet on his cheek, as he soared into the night sky, the streets below fading into darkness.

But this wasn’t his dream. It was his wife’s.

The next morning John Griffith awoke feeling heavy and weak, as if in sleep he’d swallowed a handful of large rocks and no longer had the strength to carry his own weight. No one on Pinnacle Lane ever saw Beatrix Griffith again, not even John, but he knew she was still out there, that she had not simply faded into a small pile of blue ashes he would someday find between the sheets of their bed. He knew because every night after she left, he shared her dreams. Dreams of giant flocks of pelicans, mugs of hot chocolate, and foreign men’s strong hands.

My mother didn’t want to fall in love with her strange children. She was sure that she hadn’t enough room in her heart for anyone but Jack.

She was wrong.

Lucky for us, Viviane found motherhood to be more and more agreeable as time went by. She was amazed by how easy it all was: learning how Popsicles could be made with orange juice, toothpicks, and an ice tray; how to listen for noises from a child’s bedroom even in the midst of a dead sleep; when a scraped elbow needed a kiss or a bandage. But more than that, she learned how to worry. She, who’d always thought love’s only companion was sorrow, learned that worry came hand in hand with love.

By our third birthday, Henry still had yet to utter a sound. Not a peep, not a whimper, not a grunt, a moan, or a groan. He reached other developmental stages without any obvious difficulties. Just like me, he cut his first tooth at twelve weeks, could stand on his own by our first birthday, and was walking just a couple of months later. The fact that he was silent while doing so hardly bothered our mother, or so she told herself. And perhaps he just wasn’t one for smiling. Or touching, for that matter. And when he stared into space in such a daze that Viviane couldn’t get his attention, even when banging the kitchen kettle against a black iron pot, well, that didn’t necessarily signify anything either.