The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(47)

Then late one night, on the night of Pentecost, I sat up suddenly in bed, my hair plastered to my forehead, my feathers damp with sweat.

A young girl stood at my window, her back to the room. The lace on the old-fashioned white dress she wore trailed behind her, ripped and dirty. Her black hair, a matted mass of tangles, cascaded down her back. She turned to face me, and I could see the stars shining brightly through the back of her head.

She motioned for me to follow her, then stepped through the wall.

I threw back the piles of quilts and stumbled to the window. Peering outside, I could see her waiting for me in the grass below, her ghostly form shimmering silver in the moonlight. Without another thought, I grabbed my green cloak and climbed through the window and down the bare branches of the cherry tree into the yard.

The rains still hadn’t arrived. The grass was brown and dried. It crunched underfoot. The water of the bay had crept so low that the local teens could walk straight across it without the girls getting the hems of their skirts wet.

I followed my ghostly guide to the Lutheran church and through the church’s heavy double doors. The church was decorated for Pentecost with red linens and baskets of red silk chrysanthemums. There hadn’t been any fresh flowers in months. It was the first midnight service of Pentecostal Sunday that anyone could remember when deadly puddles hadn’t formed in the doorways, waiting to break a hip or fracture a pelvis. Even the little old ladies left their rain bonnets at home. Red banners waved gently from the ceiling. Someone had prepared a batch of sugar cookies dyed with food coloring that looked more orange than red. The parishioners were mingling in the narthex of the church, holding their plates of orange cookies, when I entered. I dropped my cloak to the ground and all conversation stopped at the sight of my uncovered wings.

The black-eyed ghost led me to the sanctuary, where the head of the Altar Guild, Nathaniel Sorrows, was gathering the unblessed wafers and leftover wine to store in the sacristy near the altar.

He turned and saw me, my wings exposed. He paled. For reasons even I remain unsure of, I dropped to my knees, raised my chin, and opened my mouth. For a moment he stood unmoving, possibly awestruck by the close proximity of the blooms of my lips. Then he held up a paper-thin wafer and brought it to my mouth. I reached up and touched it with my tongue.

A strange pink fire sparked and jumped from my parted lips. A sharp gasp came from the doorway of the nave where the rest of the parishioners now stood.

The fire was still dancing on my tongue when Nathaniel, regaining his senses, dropped the flaming host from his singed fingers. He stamped the flames out with his foot, instantly immortalizing the incident with a black mark on the carpet. I blinked as though emerging from a trance, then scrambled to my feet and stumbled from the church.

Cardigan Cooper remembered the next moment more vividly than any other in her life. She had been walking past the church alone, meaning to meet Jeremiah Flannery at the reservoir, when she saw me in my green cloak stumbling up the stone pathway of the church. She knew I’d been sick. Curious, she followed me inside and watched the entire scene play out from the back of the church. I ran by her as I was fleeing the nave. She grabbed the cloak I’d dropped earlier inside the church doors and joined me in my escape. We ran all the way back to my house on the hill on Pinnacle Lane, where we both dropped to the ground and lay with our pink faces turned toward the sky. Our breath made tiny clouds of condensation against the stars.

Cardigan turned to me. “Damn, girl. What was that about?”

But the dark-haired specter in the tattered white dress was there, too. She raised a transparent finger to her lips, then smiled eerily at me before fading away into the night.

I turned my feverish cheek to the grass and sighed. “I don’t know.”

By June I was a familiar face among the nightly crowd that gathered at the reservoir. Though I always wore the cloak, my initial visit and exposure had left its impression. So had my fevered visit to the church. Many still stared. Some even pointed, saying, “Look! There she is!”

I scowled and tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore all the furtive whispers.

“F-forget them,” Rowe said. “What they th-think isn’t important.”

“Maybe not to you,” I muttered.

He held my gaze for a moment. I blushed a deep pink remembering the feel of his wool coat against my cheek on that first night at the reservoir. And for a brief moment, I compared how I was feeling to how I felt when I thought about Nathaniel Sorrows. I thought of the life I’d created for us in my head: the cocktail parties, the dog named Noodle. But it was an illusion, a prefabricated dream, while Rowe was real. I could touch him. And he could touch me. A shiver rolled up my spine when I thought of how much I would like the warmth of my palm pressed against Rowe’s, our fingers intertwined. Was this the difference between infatuation and . . . ?

“What do you mean?” Rowe asked.

“People don’t look at you like you’re —”

“A monster?” Rowe suggested.

“Yeah.”

“See my sister?” Rowe motioned to Cardigan, who stood laughing with a group of people. “The moment she o-opens her mouth, everyone im-m-mediately loves her. The mmoment I open mine, everyone immediately p-p-pities me.”

I winced. “I’m sorry.”

Rowe shrugged. “The point is, if I cared what everyone else th-thought, I’d see myself as p-pitiful, but I don’t.” He smiled. “I think I’m pretty cool.”