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.