The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(61)

She looked up in time to see the specters fade into the darkness.

The ambulance arrived at Marigold Pie’s house, soon followed by the local police. The flashing lights had drawn all of Pinnacle Lane to the scene. There were the old Moss sisters in their matching house shoes and coats and a single umbrella protecting their curlers from the rain. There was a sleepy and bed-clothed Mart Flannery and his son, Jeremiah. Zeb Cooper had jumped out of bed at the sound of the ambulance’s wail. Wearing nothing but red long johns and a pair of galoshes, he was trying to persuade his curious neighbors to move to the sidewalk. His son, Rowe, was there and his crying daughter, Cardigan — both of their faces white with shock. Next to them was his wife, Penelope, who’d wept upon learning that her own family was all right, and then again when she learned Emilienne’s family was not. There was Wilhelmina Dovewolf, guiding my mother inside Marigold’s house, both quiet in stoic despair.

There was Constance Quakenbush and Delilah Zimmer, best friends and first-grade teachers at the elementary school. There was Ignatius Lux, the high-school principal, and his wife, Estelle Margolis, and, next to them, Amos Fields, who’d never been much good to anyone since his son died in the Second Great War but always seemed to have money for a morning croissant at Emilienne’s bakery. There was Pastor Trace Graves and some of the high-school kids who’d wandered down from the reservoir. One of the boys thought to grab the big white dog standing in the street and loop his belt around the dog’s neck to keep him out of trouble. A girl wiped the dog’s muddy paws with her jacket. Eventually there were several teams of ambulance attendants and more police officers in stiff blue uniforms, their vehicles crowding the street in a chaotic jumble of flashing lights. When they carried me out — my wingless body prone on a stretcher, my mother and grandmother walking beside me in blood-covered clothes — it was said that the entire block fell silent in reverence.

The lead attendant was a big surly man who led Emilienne and Viviane into the ambulance behind me, telling his partner to watch them both for shock. Unintentionally, this left Henry to his own devices.

Though his sister, his mother, and his grandmother were on the way to the nearest hospital, Henry was happy. He was happy because the whole thing was over and he no longer had the responsibility of trying to make the Sad Man’s warning heard. Because once things turned out, good or bad, there’s nothing you can do about it. It just is. And Henry liked just is. Anything else was too complicated.

Our mother had told him to Stay here. Don’t move. So that was what Henry did. He stayed in the truck. But after a while, Henry realized that though he didn’t see anyone he knew, he did see lots of people he didn’t know, and that made him feel a little sick. Then he saw Trouver. Henry got out of the truck and walked toward the big dog, counting things as he went. Henry counted the flashing lights, the number of people gathered in the street, the umbrellas, the raindrops. He counted because counting always felt good, and it felt bad not being able to see anyone he knew. It also felt bad that Trouver was sitting with another boy, one Henry didn’t know. So Henry stayed focused on counting — counting the number of steps it took to get across the street to Trouver — until someone put a hand on his shoulder.

Henry screamed. The woman with her hand on his shoulder jumped and pulled her hand away.

“I’m sorry!” she gasped. “I just thought — you looked lost.” The woman twirled a strand of her copper-colored hair around one of her fingers. She looked around frantically. “I didn’t mean anything by it!” she insisted.

Wilhelmina rushed over, Penelope right behind her. Wilhelmina spoke to Henry in a soothing voice, all the while motioning for the boy with his belt looped around Trouver’s neck to bring the dog over. Penelope turned to the woman. “What’d you touch him for?” she scolded. “Don’t you think he’s had a rough enough night as it is?”

The woman released her hair from her finger. “Well, I certainly didn’t mean to upset him. I didn’t know he — I just thought I could help.”

“And what made you think you could do that?”

“He looked . . . He needed . . .” she stuttered nonsensically.

When Laura Lovelorn moved to the neighborhood five years ago, she hadn’t known about Viviane Lavender. Hadn’t even remembered meeting her that night at the summer solstice so many years ago. And during her many trips to the bakery for a loaf of the thick-crusted pain au levain or a dinner baguette, she’d never noticed how much Emilienne Lavender’s grandson resembled her husband. Now she was embarrassed by how blind she’d been.

After Beatrix Griffith disappeared, Laura moved away from her beloved eastern Washington — with its hot summers and snowy winters — to live with her husband in Seattle, a town known for its year-round rains. She was quickly welcomed into the neighborhood, due mainly to her themed cocktail parties and sweet disposition. She could always be counted on to buy at least one box of shortbread cookies from the local Girl Scout troop, never left the house without her white gloves, never served her husband a meal of leftover casserole, always did everything she was supposed to do. When Jack didn’t want any children, she told the girls at the hospital where she volunteered that she and Jack needed to take care of his father before they started a family of their own. After John Griffith died, she told them she and Jack wanted to travel the world instead, visit the pyramids in Egypt, walk the boot-shaped coastline of Italy. Then when Jack moved to the separate bedroom on the other side of the house, she stopped telling them anything at all.