The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(65)

Viviane placed her coffee cup on the principal’s desk. “Considering the severity of her . . . condition, I don’t think any of us are expecting her to fully recover before the spring term.”

Ignatius stammered an apology and gave his word that I could register for classes whenever I was ready. After the meeting Viviane had gone back to her truck and cried, not knowing that only thirty feet away, with his head resting on his big principal’s desk, Ignatius Lux was doing the same thing.

Viviane walked outside to where Gabe sat on the porch swing watching Henry collect insects in the yard. She handed Gabe the two glasses of lemonade in her hands before lowering herself into the crook of his arm, then took the second glass and wrapped his now-free hand around her shoulder.

“Any change?” Gabe asked.

Viviane shook her head wearily. “No. No change.”

Gabe kneaded the sore muscles in Viviane’s neck with his long fingers until the tension she held there began to fade. Viviane had been surprised by how quickly her body responded to his, how the lines of where she ended and he began seemed to melt whenever they touched. It felt natural for him to share her bed, to spend his nights asleep on her pillow. But the best part was that after twenty-seven years, Viviane was finally free of Jack Griffith — a feat so miraculous that sometimes Viviane wanted to call it out from the rooftops just to hear the echo.

“Where’s Emilienne?” Gabe asked suddenly. “Asleep again?”

“Yes.”

Since the night of the solstice, the hours my grandmother spent awake had dwindled to only a few a day. Even when I was still in the hospital, it was common for Viviane to walk in on her sleeping daughter and mother, me in the bed and Emilienne in the chair next to it, her graying hair spilling from the chignon twisted against the paper-thin skin at the nape of her neck.

Henry looked up from the grass, proudly holding up some multi-legged or winged insect trapped in between the mesh sides of the bug catcher. “See?” he called.

Since the night of the solstice, Henry spoke less and less. They tried not to let it discourage them — there was enough of that to go around already. Viviane assumed it had to do with my condition, but the truth was that Henry now found very little worth talking about. And he only talked when what he had to say was really important. That was the rule.

The day they brought me home from the hospital, Viviane had found a large unmarked envelope leaning up against the front door. Inside were two sizable checks — one made out to me, the other to Henry. Trapped in the envelope glue was a strand of copper-colored hair. As far as Viviane knew, Laura Lovelorn had returned to her beloved eastern Washington as soon as her separation from Jack Griffith was official.

“The world is definitely changing,” Viviane murmured. Gabe gave her shoulder a squeeze.

Gabe often teased Viviane about the bare ring finger on her left hand, implying, in his own gentle way, how much he wanted to marry her. She knew she would spend the rest of her nights dreaming beside the gentle giant, his chest pressed against her back, his palm lightly cupping her hip. But she also knew that she would never marry. Not Gabe or anyone else. What use did the heart have for jewelry anyway? To use her words.

Through the fall, I lay in bed with my stomach pressed against the mattress as I had since the day I was brought home from the hospital. The days and nights meshed together, forming a heavy black shroud that covered my eyes, my nose, my mouth, until I could no longer remember what it was like to feel the sun on my face. When the leaves began to change, my mother asked Gabe to move the bed so that, by turning my head to the side, I could look out the window. But when the leaves turned from green to brown, and I watched them fall to the ground to rot, I found they only reminded me of death.

By December the rains had calmed; the gray storm clouds that some suspected would never pass did, and winter arrived, carrying with it mornings of icy roads and icy car windows, and only a few scattered showers. Snow would come later, in January and February, catching them all by surprise when they awoke to a city draped in white.

December 21 marked the winter solstice. It also marked the six-month anniversary of my attack and the auspicious death of Nathaniel Sorrows. For the first time ever, Pinnacle Lane recognized the winter pagan holiday, though it was in somber, solemn tones.

Those days I often thought about death, often wondered what it might be like to die with such intensity that I could feel the edges of my body melt away, as if I were already a decomposing corpse. I imagined that being dead would feel a lot like those days when the nurse gave me a chalky white pill that left me so numb, the hours melted away like morning ice on a window. Like I was nothing at all but an insignificant shadow, a whisper, a drop of rain left to dry on the pavement.

But while the thought of being dead seemed appealing, the actual act of dying did not. Dying required too much action. And if recent events proved anything, my body wasn’t going to give over to death without a fierce fight; so if I were to kill myself, I’d have to make sure I could do it. That I’d be good and dead once it was all over and not mutilated or half deranged but still dreadfully alive. I thought of collecting handfuls of those chalky white pills, of hiding them in my cheek and stuffing them under the mattress, later washing them down in one gulp with a glass of cold tap water. I thought of sneaking into the kitchen for a steak knife sharp enough that a single slice to just one wrist would suffice — I wasn’t sure I could try to kill myself twice. I thought often of jumping from the rickety widow’s walk on the roof of the house. If it weren’t for my constant visitors, those thoughts might very well have led to some dark and dreadful act. Perhaps this was the very reason those constant visitors were there.