I’d spent so many years imagining the event, placing myself in the crowd, that I wondered if maybe, in the end, it wouldn’t matter if I actually felt the flames of the bonfire on my face. I often wondered the same thing about being kissed. Or falling in love. Did I need to experience them if I could imagine them? A part of me feared that Pinnacle Lane’s solstice celebration couldn’t possibly live up to la fête in my head.
I was thrilled to discover I was wrong. From my window for the past fourteen years, I hadn’t been able to hear the crowds sing along when the street-corner musicians played rowdy drinking songs on their mandolins and sitars. I couldn’t observe lovers finding shadows perfect for private trysts. I hadn’t known how easy it would be to avoid getting caught by my grandmother, the heat from the ovens clouding the bakery’s windows all night. Or how hard I would laugh when Rowe let the Kiwanis Key Club girls paint a tri-colored rainbow across his left cheek. And I hadn’t known how my heart would pound when Rowe pulled me aside, gently took my face in his hands, and pressed his lips to mine.
When the celebration came to an end, the fire was doused with buckets filled with water from the bay. Mothers gathered their children and husbands. Panda bears and tigers became sticky little boys and girls once again. And two angels and one boy with a rainbow painted on his cheek made their way back to Pinnacle Lane.
My mother insisted she had smelled the rain before it came. It had been a beautiful day, all clear blue skies and warm sunshine. There had been no indication that it would be anything but a picturesque midsummer’s night, except for the smell. The coming rain smelled different from any other she’d ever known. It didn’t smell like a summer rain, or even like a spring rain that had been waiting to escape water-heavy clouds since February. It didn’t smell murky, like the rain from last winter’s floods that poured into basements and left the neighborhood dogs stranded on the roofs of their doghouses. This rain smelled eerily to her like nothing at all. Or, if anything, it smelled the way she suspected an omen might smell: a lunar eclipse, the evil eye, the number 13. It smelled, also, like fear.
When Viviane sensed its approach, she had to suppress an instinct to hide. Fear had that effect. Instead, she washed the dishes in the sink. She made a casserole, not that there was anyone around to eat it. Her mother was still at the bakery — had been since early that morning — preparing for that night’s festival. Viviane hadn’t seen Gabe in a while, days even, though his truck sat parked in the driveway. She tried not to think about where he might be. Cardigan and I had insisted we weren’t hungry, and my mother assumed we were holed up in my room for the night. Then there was Henry.
Henry had been particularly agitated lately. Viviane had caught him sneaking off the hill — and by himself at that! — at least three separate times that day. It seemed whenever she looked outside, there he was, marching down the hill with that big white dog traipsing beside him. At least right now she knew both he and Trouver were in Henry’s room, fast asleep. Just in case, she peeked in on him one more time, relieved to see his sleeping head resting on his pillow.
The barren smell of the coming rain drove her to plug her nose with a clothespin. Viviane tried to remember what her mother had said about counteracting bad omens: a robin flying into the house was considered lucky. As was meeting three sheep or an itch on the top of your head. None seemed a very relevant (or practical, Viviane thought) solution until Viviane remembered the one about salt. Returning to the kitchen, Viviane hesitantly reached for the saltshaker, slowly spilled a bit of salt into her hand, then tossed it over her left shoulder. Tentatively, Viviane pulled the clothespin from her nose and breathed deeply, but, alas, the stench of impending disaster was still there.
Within that same hour, Viviane picked up a pin, dropped a glove, and turned her dress inside out and wore it with the pockets exposed and flapping at her sides. She knocked on wood until her knuckles ached and went searching through the house on her knees until she found a penny, since, apparently, picking them up was supposed to ensure some kind of daylong good luck. She turned around seven times clockwise. Crossed her fingers. Hopped backward over a broom. After all of these, she unclasped the clothespin from her nose and took a deep breath, waiting to be filled with a sense of relief. But it never came.
Finally, she surrendered and retreated to hide in the basement with the tumbling towels and the warm dryer and one of her mother’s cigars.
Tossing the clothespin aside, Viviane took a few puffs on the cigar. She felt calmer and was relieved to discover that the only thing she could smell then was the crude odor of the cigar. She rubbed her eyes. Imagine, getting this unsettled over a smell, she thought. Feeling somewhat embarrassed and silly, Viviane stubbed out the cigar and made her way back upstairs.
And that’s when the rain began to fall.
The rain increased steadily over the next hour, beating a staccato rhythm against the rooftops. People in the same houses had to yell over the noise to ask if there was a bucket to place under the leaks that were appearing in hallways, kitchens, bedrooms.
In the Lavender house, water leaked in around the poorly sealed windows, flooded the entryway with puddles, and filled the rooms with an unpleasant stink of fear.
Viviane made a mental checklist for Gabe — water damage to carpets, wood floors, and walls; leaking roof and windows — then climbed up the rickety stairs to check on the second floor.
Viviane knocked softly on my bedroom door. “Ava?” she called. “Cardigan?” Receiving no answer, she opened the door. Tufts of my long dark hair blew across the floor. The redolence of bleach stung her nose. The room, Viviane realized with stark dread, was empty. She stuck her head out the open window and peered into the rain. The bark of the cherry tree outside my room was spattered with wet brown and white feathers.
She closed the window and left. As she made her way back down the hall toward the stairs, her feet sinking into the waterlogged carpet, she paused outside Henry’s bedroom. On impulse, she pushed the door. His room was empty too.
She ran her hands through her wet hair. “Well, shit,” she said.
From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:
June 21, 1959
My pacing has worn the rug bare. My clothes have begun to smell. It doesn’t matter. Today marks the summer solstice. That they would put such effort into celebrating a pagan holiday seems only appropriate! Monsters.
She passed by once already, walking hand in hand with the other girl, who had a pair of ridiculous homemade wings attached to her back. I’ve decided to wait until they return. The most I have to wait is a few hours; that I can manage.
As I write this, I peer out at the darkening sky, distracted by . . . Is that rain?
Though I usually keep the front porch light off, I flicked it on. In the beam of light spilling across the sidewalk, I saw one, then two dark spots appear on the cement. Maybe I will ask her inside. And if she won’t come . . . No, she’ll come. She’ll have to.
FOR THE FIRST TIME, my mother understood how parents lost control. Through it all — the lonely pregnancy, fifteen years of sleepless nights — she’d managed to keep her bearings. She’d learned to adapt to whatever came along: Henry’s untouchable world, my wings. If she devised a plan and the plan proved impossible, she just created a new one. She’d never understood how other parents just lost it. Now she did; children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people. She’d never thought that could happen to her, whose children were so . . . strange. Could the strange survive on their own? Viviane hadn’t considered it possible until that moment.