The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(31)

“It’s not like she’s shown any interest in it,” Viviane said. This was true; once I’d learned how to tie the ribbons she sewed into the backs of all my clothes, and figured out that sleeping was most comfortable with the tip of one wing covering my nose, and how to pop open my wings with such force I could blow a candle out across the room, I figured I’d mastered everything that came with having wings. That I might fly never even crossed my mind.

“Maybe not yet. But when she does, I’ll be ready,” Gabe said. Gabe had decided a while ago that what Viviane’s children needed was a father. He was afraid of letting us down. If the world that Gabe knew was unprepared for a Romanian beauty with royal blood, how would it treat a child with wings? Or another who preferred to be left alone, unable to stand a hug or a kiss? The problem was, he didn’t know how to act like a father — it wasn’t as if he’d had one himself. Instead, he improvised good parenting by strapping handmade wings to his back and taking unintentional nosedives off the roof of his woodshop. Gabe had yet to decide what to do for Henry.

“Besides,” Gabe finished, “why would she have wings if she wasn’t meant to fly?”

My mother didn’t have an answer for that.

I acknowledged Gabe and his attempts at flight the way a legless child might view a hopeful but misguided parent buying a house full of stairs. After a while, when Gabe offered me a morning greeting, it didn’t feel like he was greeting me but rather a giant pair of wings; no girl, just feathers.

By 1952 Pinnacle Lane, like the rest of the world, had undergone a few changes. Two years earlier the Cooper family built a house next door to ours. The father, Zeb Cooper, was a red-haired Irishman with a thick woolly beard, a large menacing stride, and a quiet demeanor. His wife, Penelope, was a vivacious blonde quickly hired by my grandmother to help in the bakery. They had two children: a son, Rowe, who was quiet, but not quite as quiet as Henry, and a daughter, Cardigan, who had no problem declaring her age (eight) and the number of months (eleven) until her next birthday to anyone she met.

Cardigan Cooper was my first and only friend for many years.

We became such the day Cardigan peered over the fence at me where I was making mud pies in our yard and asked, “Are you a bird, an angel, or what?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t sure how to answer such a question, not because I hadn’t considered it, but because I didn’t yet have the answer. I certainly wasn’t a bird, as far as I could tell. But in the same breath, I couldn’t say I was human. What did it mean to be human anyway? I knew I was different, but didn’t that make me as human as anyone, or was I something else? I didn’t know. And at only eight years old, I hadn’t the time, the energy, or the mental capacity to form a more adequate response than “I think I’m just a girl.” Which is what I said.

“Well, you’re definitely not a bird,” Cardigan answered. “Birds don’t have noses, and they don’t have hands or ears or nothing like that neither. So I guess you are just a girl. Do you want me to come over and play with you, or what?”

I nodded. Cardigan climbed over the fence and we shyly inspected one another.

“Lemme see you fly then,” she demanded.

I shook my head.

“Why not? You ever try?”

I had not. Which was probably how my new friend quickly convinced me to climb up the cherry tree in the yard. Because, why hadn’t I tried? I remember standing precariously on a branch, how the branch shook and arched beneath my weight. I remember looking down at Cardigan’s blond head and her expectant face as she called, “Are you gonna jump?”

I closed my eyes, hoping both to fly and to fall, and equally terrified of both options. I jumped. And quickly landed, slightly bruised and bloody, on the ground.

Cardigan peered down at me. “Huh. Well, you definitely can’t fly. I guess you really are just a girl.”

I winced at the blood pooling on my scraped knee. “How d’ya know I’m not an angel?” I asked.

“Oh. That’s easy, silly.” Cardigan lightly touched one of my brown feathers. “Angels have white wings.”

I considered my wings the way some might consider a clubfoot — a defect that had no apparent usefulness and made it impossible to walk down the street without being followed by small children’s stares. Which was why I rarely fought my mother’s decision to keep us cloistered in the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane. It was safer for us there. Dangers lurk around every corner for the strange. And with my feathered appendages, Henry’s mute tongue, and my mother’s broken heart, what else were we but strange? Sheltered beneath the shroud of my grandmother’s reputation, my mother, my brother, and I remained on the hill, none of us eager to fling open the door and escape. Two of us didn’t even try.

But I did.

The neighborhood kids often gathered after dinner to play a round of sardines, or some other wild game that left them all breathless — even me, my little face in the window, watching them play from the high vantage point of the hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane. There was Cardigan, of course, and her older brother, Rowe, and Jeremiah Flannery, son of Mart Flannery, who wasn’t particularly nice but lived on Pinnacle Lane and so had all that was required of a playmate: availability.

It was while playing one such game that Cardigan came across an injured bird. It was sprawled on the ground along the stretch of yard that divided our house from that of our neighbor Marigold Pie. The bird was a starling. Its wings were fluttering and its head was red, most likely with blood, but how could she be sure? Did birds bleed red, like people did?