The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(9)

I believe that by the time the train had reached Seattle, my grandmother knew she had run out of options. It was either here or continuing on alone. So when they reached King Street Station, Emilienne mutely gathered her things and finally departed from the train.

In their quest for a home, my grandparents looked first at a Craftsman bungalow in Wallingford with a low-pitched roof and exposed rafters, but that proved far too expensive, even with the raccoon infestation in the basement. Then there was an old Victorian on Alki Point, but Connor worried that the nearby lighthouse would keep them up at night.

It was a stone Tudor with a swooping roof and crumbling foundation that brought them to a small neighborhood in central Seattle. The house stood across the street from a school where someday, Connor imagined, their children would attend classes, where their tiny handprints in thick-colored paint would be among the ones covering the windows. Connor looked up at the sky just as a light rain started to fall. It was bewildering; the Seattle rain felt so different. The misty raindrops clung to every part of him, soaked his eyelashes, and seeped into his nostrils. It was while noticing this that Connor first saw the house on the hill.

It stood alone on a hill at the end of the neighborhood’s main street, Pinnacle Lane, where the cobblestones gave way to a dirt and pebble road. The house was painted the color of faded periwinkles; it had a white wraparound porch and an onion-domed turret. The second-floor bedrooms had giant bay windows. A widow’s walk rested on top of the house, its balcony turned toward Salmon Bay. The cherry tree along the side of the house was in bloom; pink blossoms, their edges browned and withered, scattered across the porch.

There were only two neighboring homes. One belonged to a man named Amos Fields, and the other closeted the Widow Marigold Pie’s black dresses. Overgrown rhododendron and juniper bushes obscured each house from view.

The little annexed neighborhood was barely a stopping point for travelers on their way to the more established town of Ballard. On the right side of Pinnacle Lane stood the post office, the drugstore, and a brick elementary school; on the left there was the Lutheran church, with its austere walls and hard wooden pews. There was also an abandoned shop that had once sold wedding cakes and where hungry customers would soon find fresh bread and rolls hand-kneaded and marked by Connor Lavender.

Moving was a quiet affair for the Lavenders since the only earthly possession they truly needed was Connor’s cane. There was also a tin of throat lozenges filled with blue ashes and a shoe box containing the remains of a tiny yellow bird. Pierette, who’d never been emotionally stable even in human form, hadn’t survived the weary cross-country train ride. Both were buried in the empty garden bed behind the new house, marked only by a large river stone.

Emilienne walked through the house, her steps swaying under the girth of her swollen belly. She hadn’t thought it possible to get pregnant so quickly — she’d only been with her husband once before leaving Manhattan, and, with the limited space and bathing options available on the train, neither had initiated anything while aboard.

It wasn’t until they’d reached Minnesota that Emilienne began to consider the possibility that she was pregnant. Halfway through North Dakota, Emilienne was able to put into words how she felt about it. Words like disappointed, infuriated, and trapped. When she finally told Connor, somewhere between Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, she chose words different from those in her head. He’d cried with joy.

Emilienne ran her hand along the edge of the cast-iron sink before moving on to the dining room, with the built-in cabinets with lead-glass doors. She listened to the creak of the wood floors as she walked from dining room to foyer, hallway to stairwell. In a corner of the parlor stood the harpsichord that Connor had shipped from Manhattan; Emilienne planned to leave the instrument untouched. She wanted to watch as it acquired dust and the keys yellowed with age. The stubborn thing rudely refused and instead kept its glossy sheen, the keys always remarkably in tune.

The neighbors regarded Emilienne the way most do when confronted with the odd. Of course, this was a tad more complex than an aversion of the eyes from an unseemly mole or a severely scarred finger. Everything about Emilienne Lavender was strange. To Emilienne, pointing at the moon was an invitation for disaster, a falling broom the same. And when the Widow Marigold Pie began secretly suffering from a bout of insomnia, it was Emilienne who arrived at her door the next morning with a garland of peonies and an insistence that wearing it would ensure a restful sleep that night. Soon the quiet whispers of witch began following Emilienne wherever she went. And to associate with the neighborhood witch, well, that would be an invitation for a disaster much more dangerous than anything the moon might bring. So her neighbors did the only thing that seemed appropriate — they avoided Emilienne Lavender completely.

Fortunately, they found no fault with Connor — his strange wife hardly spent any time at the bakery — and the little shop began to thrive. Connor’s success could have been ascribed to a number of things. The location was certainly part of it — no passing parishioner could help but make a stop at the bakery on the way home from church, particularly on those Sundays when Pastor Trace Graves bestowed the congregation with the Holy Communion. Body of Christ or not, one torn piece of stale bread was hardly satisfying after a morning of Lutheran hymnody. If anything, it made those freshly baked loaves of sourdough and rye, displayed in the bakery window like precious gems, all the more enticing.