“Wasn’t that fun?” Cardigan exclaimed excitedly. “You should have seen their faces, Ava!” She laughed.
I glared. “How could you do that?”
Cardigan stopped laughing. She twisted her pretty hair around her finger nervously. “Well, I just thought . . .” Cardigan put her hands on her hips. “Look, you wanted to meet people, right? Now everyone knows you! You don’t have to hide anymore.”
“Are you kidding?” I was yelling now. “I’m lucky they didn’t try to burn me at the stake!”
“Okay, I get it. Jeez, will you cool it already?”
“That was possibly the most selfish thing you’ve ever done, sis,” Rowe offered.
“Selfish!” Cardigan spat. “I did it for her!”
“And how is it that you got to be the one to decide what she needed?” Rowe asked.
Cardigan opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Stay out of this, Rowe,” she finally muttered.
I threw up my hands in disgust. “I’m going home,” I said, and stormed off, leaving Rowe and Cardigan to run to catch up to me.
It was quiet on the way home — Rowe walked between me and Cardigan.
When we reached my house, Rowe said to us, “You two need to sort this out.” To me, he said, “Ava, I’m glad you c-came. Truly, it was a spectacular night. T-terrifying, sure. But spectacular.” Then he made a sharp right toward his house.
Cardigan and I watched Rowe walk away before turning to face each other. Cardigan sighed. “Listen, I thought I was doing you a favor, getting your wings out into the open, so to speak. Cross my heart I did. I wanted them to see that you’re nothing to be afraid of.”
I looked out at the quiet neighborhood around us. It all seemed so simple, so harmless under the night sky. “I would’ve liked just one night. One night to be . . . normal. To just be a girl.”
“But you’re more than that. When are you gonna realize that that’s pretty swell, too?” She threw her arms around me in a tight hug. “Will you come out with us again? Please say yes.”
I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
Cardigan smiled. “Okay, but you know you don’t have to wear the harness or anything now, right? Unless you want to, that is.”
“I think — I think I do, honestly. Well, at least I want to keep wearing the cloak.”
“But why?”
I shrugged. “I like pretending to be normal.”
Cardigan cocked her head and studied me thoughtfully. “I never thought about how hard it must be for you. Guess I am pretty selfish.” She snorted. “Just don’t tell Rowe he’s right. He’ll never let me forget it.” She smiled. “Hey, where is that cloak anyway?”
I groaned. “I forgot it at the reservoir.”
“Well, let’s go get it.” Cardigan looped her arm through mine.
I thought for a moment. “You know what? Go home. I’ll go get it myself.”
Cardigan hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Cardigan hugged me again before running home.
Now that I was alone, I felt more afraid than free; the dark seemed more formidable. I took a deep breath and reminded myself of all the times I’d wished I were out here instead of in my room. Still, I quickened my pace and pretended that my mother was standing on our front porch, watching over me.
By the time I reached the reservoir, the deep blue of the night sky had lightened — the color now diluted with specks of white clouds. Still, the shadows of the leafless trees danced eerily on the water. A birdcall became a woman’s scream. A dog’s howl became a cry of warning, the wind in my feathers, the hand of a ghost.
I found the cloak and harness — just where I’d dropped them — grabbed them, and ran, keeping my wings folded tightly against my back to keep them from slowing me down. It wasn’t until I passed the drugstore where my mother once worked that I slowed to a walk. At my grandmother’s bakery, I paused briefly and ran my fingers over the script on the window.
Wisps of orange and red were making their way across the blue sky, and I realized with a happy start that I had been out all night and hadn’t gotten caught. I let out a giddy little laugh and skipped toward home, feeling miraculously like a normal teenager.
From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:
May 11, 1959
I’ve begun attending services at the Lutheran church. I had hoped to entice Aunt Marigold to return to her virtuous ways. My plan didn’t work. I, the baptized Catholic, have been well received by the parishioners and by Pastor Trace Graves, but Marigold remains snug beneath the crumb-covered blankets on her bed. The other old women find me charming. The Altar Guild elected me as their new head — it is my responsibility to put away the Communion wafers and wine after the service. In the Catholic church, not even the altar boys are trusted to do that.
I like to set up for worship and make it a point to get up early on Sunday mornings just to be sure I can set up the altar, just to make sure nothing is forgotten by a more neglectful parishioner.
There are parts about the Lutheran service I will never get used to. For one, there is too much singing. For another, these Lutherans have little reverence for sacred space. Once the service is done, they leave their Bibles and hymnals discarded in the pews, laugh, and slap each other on the back.
The worst part, however, is that midnight services are reserved for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. My Saturday nights feel empty and Godless without my usual midnight Mass. I try to spend that time on my knees in prayer, which is how I remain awake until she walks by, returning home in those early morning hours from her nightly escapes to the reservoir, accompanied as always by the other two. As she passes my window, her feathers ruffle in the wind, and I am seized by a memory of the Nativity set my mother unpacks at Christmastime — I remember how the angel’s robes reveal a long white neck and how her lips seem stuck in a perpetual holy pout.
I didn’t plan on speaking to her that first night, but as she skipped by the place where I stood, hidden behind the dense rhododendron bushes that line Aunt Marigold’s property, I couldn’t help myself. I called hello.
She froze and her wings instinctively sprang open, as if for flight. “Who’s there?” she called, her voice like church bells.
I stepped out into the road. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you,” I said.
Her wings fluttered closed. “You didn’t,” she replied defensively. “I just wasn’t expecting to see anyone — that’s all.”
I admit I wasn’t anticipating her to be so very human, as much a young girl as she is a holy creature. It was quiet for the next few moments as I awaited my grand message from Him through her: a point of the moral compass, perhaps even a The Lord is with you. But it seemed that was not her purpose. Not this time, at least.
“I should go,” the Angel said, turning to continue up the hill.
“Wait,” I called after her.
She stopped and turned an awkward circle. “Yes?”
I smiled and took a few steps toward her. “I was wondering if I could touch them.”
She hesitated at first. Perhaps she didn’t know what I meant. But then she nodded. I ran my hand across her wings, felt the softness of the feathers course through the tips of my fingers to settle magnificently in my groin. When she broke away from me, she did so with a curt “Good night.” I watched her make her way up the hill. I raised my hands in exaltation to the Lord for granting me a visit of supreme ecstasy as only ever experienced by Saint Teresa of Ávila herself, I’m sure.
“WHAT’S HIS NAME?” I asked. Cardigan and I sat in my bedroom, awaiting the arrival of night and my freedom. In the days following my first escape, my trips to the reservoir continued, and I began to catch on to the things other teenagers took for granted. I learned, for example, how to smoke with a cigarette holder balanced between my fingers and how to paint in my eyebrows using black eyeliner. Through Cardigan, I learned which of the high-school boys knew what to do once they got a girl
alone (answer: none), how many of the girls were sincere in their kindness (answer: very few, especially the candy stripers), and what sort of stir the arrival of Marigold Pie’s nephew had caused in the neighborhood.
Cardigan thought for a moment as she studied the deep-red polish she’d just applied to her nails. “Nathaniel Sorrows.”
I repeated his name, softly, under my breath. I liked the way it felt in my mouth. I saved it on the tip of my tongue to use later, when I wanted to hear my voice wrap itself around the syllables. Na-than-iel Sor-rows. In the middle of the night — when the neighborhood cats mated in the yard or when Trouver ran in his dreams — I would awake, calling out his name.
“What do you think about him?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t give me away. I stole a peek at Cardigan, still busy admiring her nails, and was grateful that her self-absorption made her deaf to the increased beat of my heart. I never told Cardigan about my encounter with him. I wasn’t sure why, but every time I thought of telling her, some impulse held me back. Maybe I felt that I’d finally earned the right to a secret, something to keep from even my best friend. Just like any other normal girl.
Cardigan blew on her nails. “He seems kinda square. Cute, though.”
I nodded, lost in thought. I found it odd that this stranger affected me so. He was attractive, sure. But was that it? When he’d asked to touch my wings, I wanted to say yes. So I did. And afterward, as I lay in bed, I could still feel the warmth of his fingers on the tips of my wings.
My mother often suffered extended bouts of melancholy, times when her thoughts of Jack Griffith would not dissolve with a sigh or a shake of the head. In bed she would think of that solstice night beneath the dahlias and Jack’s chest, white in the moonlight, until her skin tingled. She flushed thinking of his mouth moving across her collarbone, his hand pressed hotly against hers, their palms slick with mingled sweat. Like warm wax, the memory of his touch melted on her thighs, dripped down her leg.
For several nights’ running, she would dream of him: his smile revealing the gap between his incisors, his hands clasping a bouquet of flowers — all wilted but for the daffodil, the symbol for unrequited love. She would awake with tears in her hair. Before bed, she drank cups of tea made from the crushed dried leaves of California poppies, which Wilhelmina swore could cure any type of insomnia. Only then could she sleep, a dark sleep of empty hallways and locked doors.
When that didn’t work, Viviane did the laundry. On those nights when sleep proved impossible, she sat deep in the basement, lulled by the lazy dance of the towels in the dryer. She loved the smell of the detergent, the rumble of the machine, and the warmth of the sheets when they emerged. But more than anything else, she loved the satisfaction of removing a stain: she loved how, with a little hand soap or a drop of bleach, she could remove a pen leak from a shirt pocket, a lipstick mark from a sleeve, or a rust stain from a lace curtain. Blood was the best; how satisfying it was to remove a drop of blood from a white shirt, a glove, or a pair of women’s underwear. How satisfying to watch the red slowly fade from the fabric, leaving it clean once again with no sign of having ever been anything but white.
There remains only one photograph of my mother in her youth. My grandmother was hardly one for capturing childhood memories. Gabe found the photo pressed between the pages of an old book on dragonflies. He kept it hidden in a box he’d carved from a block of cedar. I recall seeing it once when snooping through the woodshop when I was a child.
The photograph, yellow and cracking sharply along the edges, was taken when Viviane was still Jack’s girl and Gabe had yet to arrive at our front door. The picture was, in fact, of Viviane and Jack. Viviane’s mouth was open wide in laughter, and Jack was looking at her in such a way that made it obvious: Jack had truly loved Viviane.
Gabe often compared the laughing Viviane in the picture to the Viviane who found solace in the laundry room and with cups of tea and busy housework, the Viviane who’d spent the last fifteen years waiting for Jack to come back for her. How the pain she carried didn’t knock her to the ground, he never knew; that it didn’t only made him love her more fiercely.
It took several visits to the elementary-school librarian and one trek to the zoo on the hill for Gabe to figure out what kind of bat he’d caught. It was a little brown Myotis. And a spirited one at that. Every time Gabe reached into the cage to try to get a look at its wings, the bat bit the tips of his fingers. The bat had no such problem trusting Henry; it ate tiny grasshoppers and mosquitoes straight out of his hands. Eventually, Henry had even coaxed the bat to climb onto his outstretched finger. There the bat slept upside down, permitting Gabe to finally pull its wings open to locate the humerus and the metacarpal.
This new set of wings took several weeks to build. Basing the structure on the bat’s skeletal system, he made the wings’ frames out of oak — not a lightweight wood but with good bending qualities. Then he stretched an old piece of canvas across the frames. Again, the sounds of Gabe’s hammer and saw filled my mother’s dreams.
When the wings were finished, Gabe carried them to the roof of the woodshop. He peered down at Henry, who sat with his back against Trouver’s front legs; the bat hung upside down from Henry’s left thumb. It looked to Gabe like Henry was giving him a very large thumbs-down.
Gabe slipped his arms into long pockets he’d sewn into the fabric of each wing. He stepped to the edge of the roof. It was dark, but Gabe could see most of the neighborhood from where he stood — the lights in his neighbors’ homes shone like lighthouse beacons. His initial impulse was to jump, but after some careful thinking, Gabe stretched out his winged arms and dropped over the edge in a perfect swan dive. He’d practiced flapping many times before, perfectly emulating the wing beats of the duck, the seagull, the California brown pelican. This time he only had to flap once before the wind caught under his wings and he was flying.
He was flying!
He wasn’t actually flying. He was gliding, and only gliding until he came to a rather disappointing stop via the lilac bush at the bottom of the hill.
It was a harsh landing — the lilac bush was never the same. The wings, unfortunately, were ruined. There was a slash through one side of the canvas, and the frame was snapped. Gabe was, remarkably, unharmed.
Henry shook the bat from his thumb, waving to it as it disappeared into the night.
Gabe trudged into the house, dragging the jumble of canvas and oak behind him.
Viviane raised her eyebrows at the mess he dropped on the kitchen floor. “How many failed attempts does this make?” she asked.
“Four,” he admitted. “It’s the feathers, Vivi. I can’t imitate the feathers.”
“Yes. That is the problem,” she said, her tone unkind.
Gabe ignored it.
Viviane sighed. “I don’t know what’s worse — thinking yours will work or hoping hers will.”
Gabe stared at her. “Why won’t you let me help her?”
This was too much for my mother. “Because it’s stupid, Gabe!” she snapped. “It’s stupid and mean to tell a young girl that she can fly, only to have her heart, not to mention her bones, broken when she realizes she can’t.”
“So, you think it’s better she doesn’t even try?”
“I do.”
“What about what I think? I should have a say, Vivi.”
“What gives you a right to have a say in the lives of my children?” she spat.
“Are you kidding me?” Gabe’s booming steps rattled the house as he stormed around the kitchen. “I’ve been here from the very beginning. I’ve fed them, I’ve changed them. I take care of them when they’re sick. I hold them when they’re sad. I’ve done more than their own father has or ever will!”
“Is that why you’re still here? For my kids? Because it’s pathetic,” she said meanly. “It’s pathetic that, after all this time, you’re still here.”
Gabe grabbed Viviane’s shoulders. Neither seemed to know whether he was going to shake her
or kiss her.
“Why have you stayed?” she asked softly.
Gabe dropped his hands and shook his head. “Vivi, if you don’t know that by now, then I’m not the only stupid one around here.”
He looked at her one last time before storming out the back door.
From my bedroom upstairs, I had heard the entire argument. My hands were pressed against my mouth in disbelief. No one ever yelled in our house. Still vibrating from the shock of the slammed door, I ran downstairs. “You’re not going after him?” I asked my mother with alarm.
When she spoke, it was just a whisper. “Let him go, Ava,” she said. “It’s for the best.”
But I couldn’t. I raced out after Gabe. At the bottom of the hill, I stood helplessly as his truck took him away.
“Please,” I called softly, “don’t leave us here alone.”
From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:
May 15, 1959
My days spent studying Scripture are finished; I’ve learned all I can from their musty pages. I let Aunt Marigold sit unattended for hours as I look through her personal library instead, searching for the words my heart craves, words written out of love: the letters Abelard wrote for his Héloïse, Napoleon for the empress Josephine, Robert Browning for the budding poetess Elizabeth Barrett. I scrawl my thoughts of her in the margins of the pages — mimicking their words of love. I imagine folding the pages into elaborate creatures to leave on her window’s ledge or transcribing my feverish devotions onto the glass with a finger and my own hot breath. I imagine the wet words greeting her when she awakes. How she might tremble when she reads them again and again, until the sun rises and dries up my message of unwavering adoration and fidelity.
She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved. It was her face that launched the Trojan War, her untimely demise that inspired the building of India’s Taj Mahal. She is every angel in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
In my mind, her voice is tinged with an Italian accent or the dialect of Provence. In my mind, she is dressed as a lady of the Renaissance. I imagine peeling the many layers of dress from her body, worshipping her wings. In my dreams I watch our children — all birds — fly from her womb. I name each after one of the apostles: Simon Peter a crane, Thomas an owl, Judas a big black crow.