The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(34)

“What is that?” Viviane asked, pausing at the kitchen sink.

“I believe it’s a dog.”

“Oh.”

No more than seven inches long, the dog was nothing more than a pup with oversize paws and a growling belly. Viviane filled a bowl with the cream from the top of the milk bottle and placed it on the floor. They stood and watched as the dog lapped it up.

Viviane stayed in the kitchen with the dog long after Gabe left to attend to a broken gate in Marigold Pie’s yard. The dog finished the cream and slid across the linoleum as it sniffed along the bottom edge of the refrigerator.

Years earlier Jack Griffith’s final kiss had burned a strawberry-colored butterfly into the back of Viviane’s neck. Only after applying multitudes of rose oil to the spot did it slowly fade to a dark beige mark that itched when she was nervous. She was scratching that spot when she heard the sound of shuffling feet coming from outside the kitchen.

Viviane set a piece of toast with orange marmalade on the table for Henry. It was his usual breakfast, the only thing he would eat for his morning meal. She resisted the urge to muss his hair when he sat down.

While he ate, Henry watched the puppy climb awkwardly into the laundry basket, rub its head against Viviane’s clean white towels, sigh contentedly, and fall into a deep puppy sleep. Cautiously Henry got up from the table. Then, awkwardly folding his oversize teenage limbs beneath him, Henry sat down beside the puppy in the laundry basket. Henry reached over and ran a finger down the puppy’s back and circled the goldenrod spot on its side. The puppy opened an eye. Henry closed one of his own. The puppy scratched its ear. Henry scratched his. Henry yawned. The puppy yawned, making a squeaky noise. That prompted Henry to fall over onto the floor, where he laughed silently. After he recovered, Henry took a deep breath and declared, “Trouver!”

At that, Viviane dropped the bowl she’d been holding to the floor. Amid the shattering porcelain, she said, “Well, yes.” And whether it was a declaration meant for Henry, the dog, or perhaps a little of both, from then on the dog was known as Trouver, the French word meaning “to find.”

Emilienne wasn’t entirely correct in asserting that Henry solely understood one language over another; it was that he favored certain words from each. For example, Henry preferred when someone offered to help him with his moufles, not his mittens; made him petit pois, not peas, for dinner; and served pamplemousse rather than grapefruit for lunch. He liked when Emilienne used the word impeccable instead of clean and was partial to a cup and spoon over a fork, knife, or plate. He liked driftwood, trifle, and cavernous and later would hate the word pubic, and prefer mamelon to nipple.

Henry went on to communicate in other unique ways. Good was caramel, and bad was fumigate. He called Gabe cedar, which we attributed to the way Gabe’s hands smelled after a day in his woodshop. I was pinna, the Latin word for feather. Our mother, étoile de mer, which was French for starfish. No one could explain that one.





THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky.

Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe.

The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop.

Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite.

Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips.

The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm.

But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.