The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(38)

Good, she must have thought, and slowly made her way back to Henry, who was frantically painting a map of our neighborhood across the front porch in soapy water.

It was just after that that Cardigan and I saw a taxicab pull up to Marigold Pie’s house. A man got out and retrieved a raggedy-looking suitcase from the trunk, then gave a halfhearted wave to the cab as it pulled away. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Marigold’s visitor carried a well-used journal in his back pocket. He took the journal everywhere he went.

Curious and impulsive, I dashed down the hill and ducked behind a lilac bush near the road to spy. The man walked slowly up Marigold’s front walk, taking in our quiet neighborhood. He paused for a moment, shielded his eyes from the sun, and stared up at my house at the top of the hill. Before he continued into Marigold’s house, I swore he saw me hiding there in the lilacs.

The door closed behind him, and I ran back up the hill to Cardigan, who looked bemused.

“Who do you suppose that was?” I asked breathlessly.

Cardigan shrugged. “What a dreamboat, though, don’t you think?”

I glanced back down the hill, my head reeling with the thought of this man having seen me. Could he have liked what he saw? “Oh,” I murmured, blushing. “I don’t know.”

Years ago, when Emilienne’s family was still whole and living in that tenement in Beauregard’s Manhatine, Emilienne’s maman spent a good deal of her time finding scraps of fabric to contribute to the quilts that were intended for her daughters’ dowries. The quilts were meant to be enclosed in elaborately hand-carved trousseaux, along with lace pillowcases and heavy silver flatware. They were also meant to be split fairly between three daughters, not left as an inheritance for the lone survivor, but Emilienne had long ago learned that perfection was hardly something to expect in life.

Each quilt carried a telling name, and years later each would find its way onto an appropriate bed — “Bright Hopes” for Viviane before Jack, “Broken Path” for after, “Dove in the Window” for me, and the “Crazy Quilt” for Henry.

Emilienne herself slept under a pile of plain woolen blankets.

Emilienne straightened the quilt on Henry’s bed, being careful not to disturb anything. Viviane all but ran the house those days, but occasionally Emilienne could find a menial task to fill her time and keep her mind off things she’d rather not think about. From out of the corner of her eye, she could see the faint outline of a man illuminated by the thin triangle of sun coming through the window. She’d learned over the thirty-six years since his death that the more she ignored him, the louder the ghost of René tried to speak. If Emilienne had looked at him, she would have seen the place where his mouth used to be. He seemed to be yelling right then and gesturing wildly out the window with his hands.

Instead, she gave a pillow one final thump and, with practiced immunity, stepped right through the apparition in the corner, never stopping to find out what he was trying to say this time. If she had . . . well, it’s hardly worth fretting over ifs and whens.

C’est la vie, as she might say.

Downstairs Emilienne found Henry at the dining-room table, licking frosting off a spoon. They were there as well. All three of them — René, who dogged her steps, along with Margaux and the canary, Pierette. And someone Emilienne had never seen before — a small, dark-haired child with thick eyebrows and chapped lips. The child ran her hand along the collection of antique teapots atop the oak hutch, her translucent fingers tracing the edges of the porcelain pots.

It wasn’t just that they were there. That she’d gotten used to, along with Pierette’s incessant chirping, René’s mutilated face, the hole in Margaux’s chest where her heart used to be. No, the truly awful part was that Henry was talking with them.

Well, he was talking with René, the only one who spoke. Even if Emilienne had allowed herself to hear him, René was hardly easy to understand, what with his not having an actual mouth and all. But Henry and René didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with one another.

René would mutter something and Henry would nod, as if in agreement. “Bee in the bush and cat on the wall,” Henry said seriously around the spoonful of frosting in his mouth.

Emilienne went into the kitchen and got out a plate for a slice of the chocolate cake she’d left on the counter.

The ghost child followed her into the kitchen. With black, vacant eyes she watched Emilienne. And though Emilienne tried to block it out, she heard the child’s quiet whisper clearly: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Very few in the neighborhood then knew or remembered the story of Fatima Inês de Dores and her ship captain brother — the way the child paced the widow’s walk awaiting his return, the Communion wafer that burst into flame when it touched her tongue. Some mistook the story of the siblings for a fairy tale, even congratulating themselves for thinking up such a vivid bedtime story to tell their children. Emilienne knew better than to disparage something as powerful as a fairy tale, and she never forgot the tale of the ill-fated little girl who once roamed the hallways of the house on the hill. Or rather, it seemed, still did.

Emilienne coughed a mouthful of ashes into the air.

She wiped away the gray soot stuck to her teeth, left the cake in the kitchen, and joined Henry in the dining room, where he’d just finished his final spoonful of frosting. Henry went to his grandmother and took her face between his hands. “The Sad Man needs you to know,” he said to her.