The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(66)

Gabe was in charge of breakfast, and each morning prepared simple culinary comforts: plate-size pancakes with gobs of butter and maple syrup licking down the sides; browned links of sausages; slices of smoked bacon; hard-boiled eggs — all served using Emilienne’s good china and linen napkins and the heavy silver knives and spoons. Gabe put everything on a tray and brought it upstairs to my room, bringing Henry along with him. In his own silent way, Henry was best at getting me to eat, and on the days when I wouldn’t, well, there was always Trouver.

Lunch was brought up by Cardigan, who dutifully arrived at our front door every afternoon, first just as the sun moved to its one o’clock spot, and then a little later in the day once school began. She brought her schoolwork with her, reading aloud from the books whose pages she’d been assigned and whispering secret plans she’d made for us when I was better.

“When you’re better . . .” she’d begin.

Most of the time Cardigan spent the hours of her visit lying next to me, holding my hand as we stared at the wall in silence. Once I turned my unfocused eyes to my best friend and said, “This suits you,” meaning Cardigan’s new, simplified look.

To which Cardigan replied, “This doesn’t suit you,” meaning everything else.

Dinner always varied. Sometimes it was brought by my mother. Sometimes it was Penelope or her husband, Zeb, who did card tricks with his calloused hands as I took a few meager bites from my meal. On the days Wilhelmina would come, she’d bring with her tiny satchels of dried herbs, which she’d hand to Viviane with specific instructions for water temperature and seeping time before heading upstairs. When it was ready, Viviane brought the bitter tea with my dinner. We watched and listened as Wilhelmina stood by the open window and sang in a low, melodious voice, tapping out the rhythm of her healing chant on the elk-skin drum she held in her hand. When Wilhelmina sang, my heart slowly became the beating of the drum. My breathing steadied, and I fell into a semi-hypnotic state not unlike that brought on by the chalky white pills, but a much more pleasant one.

I often thought I was going crazy — or maybe not going but already there. As if my future was only a locked room with white painted walls and white painted floors, with no windows or doors or any means to escape. A place where I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out.

Instead of dying, instead of slowly disappearing until only a broken body remained, what happened was quite the opposite — my body began to repair itself.

I was grateful to the nurse who came every day to change my bulky bandages, even when it was quite clear that I no longer needed them. The nurse never said a word to either my mother or grandmother. I appreciated this; it gave me time to think, and I needed that time, what with all these images of death muddying my thoughts.

Then one night I awoke to find a man sitting by my bed, one hand covering the place where his face had been shot off.

“Don’t be afraid,” the man said. His words were thick and warped, as if his voice were leaking out of parts of his body other than his mouth.

“I’m not,” I replied, my own voice strange with disuse. “I know who you are.”

If the man could have smiled, he would have. “And who am I, then?”

“You’re death, of course.” I sighed. “To be honest, I find it comforting that you’ve been looking for me as much as I’ve been looking for you. Will it be long now?”

“Not long.”

I shivered. “What is it like? Being dead?”

“What do you think it is like?”

I pondered this question, noticing only then that I was still clutching one of Rowe’s letters. “I think death is something like being drugged or having a fever,” I whispered. “Like being a step away from everyone else. A step so large and wide that catching up quickly becomes impossible, and all I can do is watch as everyone I love slowly disappears.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“We all have a choice.”

I laughed cruelly, but I didn’t care. “Do we? What about you? Did you choose to come here? To spend your afterlife as a misshapen monster?”

“Ah, ma petite-nièce, I volunteered.”

“Why?”

The man stood. “Love makes us such fools,” he said, his transparent form shimmering slightly before disappearing completely.

For the first time in six months, I pulled myself up into a sitting position. I lowered my weak legs to the floor and tried to walk across the room in shaky steps to the window. The maple tree outside stood against the dark sky, its bare limbs shivering in the cold. I looked down at the road knowing that in only a matter of hours it would bring Rowe home on break for the holidays. I had read every one of his letters so many times it was as if each word had been permanently inscribed on the inside of my eyelids. I knew that in the second letter he misspelled the word existence, replacing the second e with an a; in the fourth he forgot to dot the i in believe. I slept with them not under my pillow but clutched in my hand, with the sweat from my dreams leaking from my palms and smudging the ink. And I’d read the last line of the letter I received only a few days before — the final Rowe would send before coming home — until the words had lost all meaning to my head and only my heart still understood.

I loved you before, Ava. Let me love you still.