I scowled and tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore all the furtive whispers.
“F-forget them,” Rowe said. “What they th-think isn’t important.”
“Maybe not to you,” I muttered.
He held my gaze for a moment. I blushed a deep pink remembering the feel of his wool coat against my cheek on that first night at the reservoir. And for a brief moment, I compared how I was feeling to how I felt when I thought about Nathaniel Sorrows. I thought of the life I’d created for us in my head: the cocktail parties, the dog named Noodle. But it was an illusion, a prefabricated dream, while Rowe was real. I could touch him. And he could touch me. A shiver rolled up my spine when I thought of how much I would like the warmth of my palm pressed against Rowe’s, our fingers intertwined. Was this the difference between infatuation and . . . ?
“What do you mean?” Rowe asked.
“People don’t look at you like you’re —”
“A monster?” Rowe suggested.
“Yeah.”
“See my sister?” Rowe motioned to Cardigan, who stood laughing with a group of people. “The moment she o-opens her mouth, everyone im-m-mediately loves her. The m-moment I open mine, everyone immediately p-p-pities me.”
I winced. “I’m sorry.”
Rowe shrugged. “The point is, if I cared what everyone else th-thought, I’d see myself as p-pitiful, but I don’t.” He smiled. “I think I’m pretty cool.”
I laughed.
“I just don’t think you should let other people d-define you,” Rowe said quickly. “I think you could be anything you wanted.”
There were very few people who made me feel as if they saw me as me, and not as some winged aberration. My mother was one of them. Henry was another (not that being regarded as “normal” by Henry was anything to brag about). Rowe, I was coming to realize, was another.
“Thanks,” I said softly.
We walked slowly around the edge of the reservoir. I balanced on the ledge, occasionally dipping a foot into the water as I walked. I could feel Rowe’s eyes on me. I turned to him and made a face. “What?” I asked.
Rowe shrugged. “You. Just — you.”
When I passed Widow Pie’s house that night, I forgot to imagine Nathaniel waiting for me behind the rhododendron bushes. I tried saying his name aloud to myself and was surprised by how foreign it felt on my tongue. And with that, the love I thought I had for Marigold Pie’s nephew ran off me like water from melting ice. Like so many others, Nathaniel Sorrows was interested only in my wings. Unlike Rowe, I considered thoughtfully.
I reached over and closed my curtains with a determined snap and went to bed.
That night I dreamed I could fly.
Every once in a while, Emilienne allowed herself to contemplate what she might have done with her life if she’d never married and had instead grown old in Beauregard’s Manhatine apartment; if she hadn’t fallen in love with the way prospective suitors praised the half-moons of her fingernails; if she had instead allowed them to climb the rickety rungs of the fire escape to her floor whereupon she would pluck their fingers from the bars, then howl with laughter as they fell.
She reached up and touched the belled lip of her old cloche hat — the one painted with red poppies — and the house on Pinnacle Lane fell away, replaced by the crumbling plaster walls of that derelict apartment: the kitchen sink, with its cracked porcelain and lines of rust circling the drain; the old-fashioned icebox, with its metal hinges and the square block of ice that made them feel rich even when the cupboards were bare; the bureau with the drawer where Pierette slept and the corners where her feathers gathered; the sofa René balanced on his forearms.
And though she still wouldn’t converse with her ghostly siblings, Emilienne could, in a fashion, communicate with them as they might have been.
She started with an inquiry after Margaux’s child. When Margaux showed off her infant, Emilienne at first smiled, then turned away when she saw his eyes — one green, the other blue. Margaux held her son protectively against the hole where her heart used to be. She was exceedingly proud of her offspring; he was the greatest thing she’d accomplished in her life. And in her death.
Where was Maman? Beauregard? They didn’t know. There was only ever the three of them and the baby — and sometimes a young black-eyed girl. What was death like? she wondered. They did not seem able to answer, nor could they tell her why, in the afterlife, they would continue to carry the evidence of their sins in such a gruesome way.
“Maybe you are in purgatory,” Emilienne offered.
René shrugged. Maybe.
Sometimes Margaux would motion to the harpsichord in the corner of the parlor, a request for Emilienne to play. That’s when the walls of the Manhatine apartment would melt away — along with the warbling voices of her siblings — and the walls of the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane would spring back up around her, the harpsichord unused, yellowing in the corner.
From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:
May 26, 1959
It seems that the Angel has passed her fire into me — from her mouth through the burning host and into my fingers. At first the fever showed itself as a pink flush across my cheeks and down my neck. Beads of sweat sizzled on my forehead. I woke up in the night covered in a prickly heat rash and sat in a tub filled with ice cubes until the melted water steamed off my body. I tried suppressing the rash through starvation and lashes and desperate prayer, through a week spent kneeling on a hairbrush, a board of nails, a pincushion. I tried pushing the heat away with a glass of wine or a mouthful of food, but the only things edible in Marigold’s kitchen made me choke.
Perhaps this heat is punishment for my impure thoughts. Despite this, I still watch for her every night. I stand in Aunt Marigold’s dark yard, wiping the sweat from my face and from under my arms with a red handkerchief, and wait. I carefully prepare conversations to share, but every time she passes, flanked by the other two — the girl wearing some revealing midriff, the boy in a navy-issue wool peacoat — I become transfixed by the way the wind ruffles her feathers, and all my planned words slip down my throat.
I am unable to concentrate. One moment I am changing the reader board in the church’s yard — making sure each letter is properly aligned and positioned, that I am spelling each word correctly — and the next I am lying in an imaginary bed of feathers.
When it comes to Aunt Marigold, I admit that I am failing quite spectacularly. She has grown — it should be recorded — to roughly the size and shape of the mattress on her bed. I now believe that the reason for my being here on Pinnacle Lane has nothing to do with my aunt, and everything to do with the Angel. I’ve started slipping tranquilizers into the éclairs she eats by the pound. It is the only way I can maintain the number of visions the Lord sends me of the Angel. The hours I used to spend in prayer I now use on the memory of her wet mouth. This is now how I pray.
Perhaps this heat isn’t a penance I am meant to suffer. Perhaps it is a gift, each drop of sweat the Angel’s kiss, sweetly progressing down the length of my spine.
THREE WEEKS INTO JUNE, the meteorologists brought out their fancy rain gauges and showed the public what we already knew — it still hadn’t rained. The rich Seattle soil dried up in the garden beds, and the winds blew great gusts of it into the eyes of those along Pinnacle Lane. Even the rose gardens down in Portland were suffering. It had been three months since any fresh flowers had graced the altar at the Lutheran church. There would be no flowers for the women to wear in their hair at the summer solstice celebration, which made them weep. Well, either that or the wind had blown specks of dirt in their eyes.