The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(39)

Startled, Emilienne looked to her siblings. The Sad Man? René? But they were gone. Only the young dark-haired specter stared back at her from the corner of the room.

“Yes?” Emilienne whispered, looking into Henry’s wide eyes.

“There’s red on the floor and feathers everywhere,” he replied.

And with that, Fatima Inês faded away.

After Fatima’s visit, Henry carried on an endlessly looping conversation that sounded a bit like this:

“Henry, what do you want on your toast this morning?”

“There’s a bee in the bush!” he insisted.

“Jam? Butter? Honey?”

“And a cat on the wall!”

“What about cereal instead?”

“There’s red on the floor and feathers everywhere!”

Then he would tear around the house calling, “Pinna hurt! Pinna hurt!” as Trouver barked wildly behind him.

From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:

April 29, 1959

In the past, staying with my aunt Marigold meant sleeping on starched sheets, and it meant the musty stench of her potpourri seeping into the fabric of my clothes. It meant early morning services at the Lutheran church down the street and afternoon tea served on my aunt’s finest china, but without the customary array of butter cookies or crumpets with marmalade. This time I arrived to a house in disarray — dust had gathered atop her decorative knickknacks, and the furniture had lost its usual pine-scented shine. And it seems my once-righteous aunt now has an appetite only for desserts: raspberry jam–filled scones, maraschino cherry pudding, and butterscotch brownies fill the kitchen counters and the shelves of the refrigerator. It is rare to see her without her mouth full, without her swollen fingers brushing crumbs from her lips. She keeps tiny chocolates beneath the pillows on her bed. Her sheets are perpetually smeared with caramel and toffee and cherry liqueur. Once I even found a slice of chocolate cake, the frosting completely licked off, hidden under her bed.

Exactly how I am meant to help my now-fat aunt, I don’t know. Of course, I admit to no one that I am at a loss. I’ve never had to work at helping someone turn away from sin; for reasons known only to Him, my effect on people has always been somewhat spontaneous. Mother says it isn’t for me to question how the Lord does His work through me; it is enough knowing that He does.

Therefore, I know that He would not place something or someone so blatantly holy before me to disregard. An Angel, defined as I remember it, is an agent of God sent forth to execute His purposes. It is supremely fitting that this Angel should appear on the street where His most reverent follower is staying, where I have been struggling to hear His call and execute His purpose. It is true that I looked at her, perhaps much longer than appropriate, but on the day I arrived and caught my first glimpse of those wings and that beautiful angelic face, I thought I was going mad!





TROUVER HAD GROWN fast into his big paws. We had hoped he’d remain small and manageable, but once he passed one hundred pounds, we knew we weren’t dealing with a Maltese or a shih tzu. Trouver was a Great Pyrenees — a purebred at that — which was quite remarkable considering he’d been found rifling through the peony bush in our backyard. His pelt resembled that of a white musk ox, and when he shed, tufts of fur the size of small rabbits blew like white tumbleweeds across the wood floors of our house.

Trouver and Henry were inseparable and often walked not dog following boy but side by side. They were walking in this way — a strange set of conjoined twins — when they strode into the woodshop where Gabe was nursing a bleeding lip after another failed attempt at flight.

Gabe had built the first set of wings out of lacquered cheesecloth stretched over a bamboo frame. When that didn’t work, he tried wicker — a weave of willow bark and madrone twigs — but each of those creations proved too heavy. Another set he made out of aluminum wire and gauze, which sent Gabe spiraling into a panicky nosedive after he launched himself off the roof of the shed.

Gabe dragged himself back into the woodshop, bleeding from the mouth and glad that only Henry, and neither my mother nor I, had witnessed that test flight. “Failure number four,” Gabe muttered, and he tossed the broken wings onto the growing trash pile in the corner of the shop. In doing so, he disturbed a bat living in the rafters of the woodshop. He followed the bat as it made its way outside, and when Gabe saw the bat’s wings beat against the night sky, Gabe realized he’d been looking for inspiration in the wrong place. He also decided he had to catch that bat.

“We need your mother’s colander,” Gabe said to Henry. “And a large supply of beetles, mosquitoes, flies, and — moths. Like that one!” Gabe reached out and grabbed a brown-winged insect in midflight. He carried it into the kitchen and placed it in an empty coffee can, the fluttery drum of its wings echoing against the tin sides. He dug through the cupboards until he found the colander. In the living room, he thumbed through the books on birds he received by mail order years before until he found what he was looking for: a short section on bats included in the back of one.

From a second-floor window, my mother watched Henry in the yard snatch moths out of the air.

Viviane suddenly recalled the day Jack left for college. She remembered the glass jar he presented her, and then watching as he made his way back down the hill, and the look of the taillights of his father’s Coupe.