And with that began a conversation that would repeat for several hundred more miles as Emilienne rejected Billings, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and all the towns in between. Connor Lavender was so exasperated that he hadn’t spoken to his wife since they’d left the train station in Ellensburg, a town that had once famously burned to the ground completely. Emilienne took one look outside and said, “Whatever made them want to rebuild it?”
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.
Many preferred not to acknowledge it, but Emilienne certainly played a part in the bakery’s success, if only behind the scenes. She had impeccable taste and an eye for appealing design, for flattering fabrics and colors (of course she did — she was French). She used her natural talents in choosing the butter-yellow paint for the bakery walls and the white lace valances for the windows. She arranged wrought-iron tables and chairs across the black-and-white-tiled floor, where customers sat to enjoy a morning sticky bun and the wafting scents of cinnamon and vanilla. And though all these ingredients helped build the bakery’s recipe for success, Connor’s bakery did so well because Connor was an exceptional baker.
He’d learned from his father, who took his crippled son under his wing and taught him all there was to know about feeding the New York masses: how to make black-and-white cookies, sponge cake, rum-and-custard-filled crème puffs. When Connor married Emilienne Roux and moved to Seattle, he brought with him those same recipes and served them with panache to the people of Pinnacle Lane, who claimed to have never before tasted such decadent desserts.
So, naturally, Connor spent most of his time at the bakery, which for Emilienne meant whittling the hours away in the big house, walking her restless womb from one room to the next, waiting for her husband to return home. For night to fall. For time to go by. As the months passed, Emilienne watched the yellowed leaves of the cherry tree in the yard rot in the autumn rain. She watched mothers walk their children to school, watched her own body change — morphing daily into something foreign and abstract, something that no longer belonged to her.
Pregnancy proved to be a very lonely time for Emilienne even though she was never alone: not on the day she married Connor Lavender, or when she refused to leave the safe haven of the cramped sleeper car, or even when murmurs of witch drifted up from the neighborhood and through the house’s open windows. They were always there. Him with his urge to speak despite his face having been shot off, and her with a cavern in the place where her heart once beat, sometimes with that child on her hip — that phantom child with mismatched eyes. And then there was the canary.
Only when she daydreamed that she was back in that dilapidated tenement in Beauregard’s Manhatine — when the high notes of Pierette’s effervescent laugh still echoed through the hallways, when René’s beauty still rivaled her own, before Margaux had betrayed her — could Emilienne attempt to understand them. But Emilienne could rarely bring herself to think of her former life and all the pain that existed there. She’d moved across the country to get away from it — how dare they insist on following her! Her unwelcome guests — for unwelcome they were! — ?provided her little comfort. She refused to decipher the frantic gestures her dead siblings made and never stopped long enough to make sense of the silent words that poured from their lips. No matter how desperately they tried, she was determined not to listen.
During her daily explorations, Emilienne discovered relics of Fatima Inês de Dores still littered a number of rooms in the large house: the gifts her brother brought home from his trips overseas. There was the marionette, the chess set, the glass marbles, and hundreds of porcelain dolls. Dolls with blinking eyes, with jointed arms and legs. Dolls with bonnets, dressed in saris, wrapped in kimonos printed with dragons and with tiny fans tied to their tiny hands. There were cowboy dolls riding saddled toy Appaloosas, Rajasthani dolls sent from India, Russian nesting dolls, fashion paper dolls. There was a giraffe the size of a small sheepdog and a rocking horse, its runners creaky with age. No one had had the courage to rid the house of them. Their watchful unblinking eyes might well have been the reason so few people had ever wanted to occupy the house.
If Fatima Inês, apparition or otherwise, still existed in the house, Emilienne would be the one to know. After all, she was the woman with whom the flowers seemed to converse, whose three deceased siblings mutely followed her around the house instead of fading into the afterlife. But Emilienne knew better than to believe the house was haunted by the young girl’s restless spirit.
On one particularly frustrating day, when words much worse than witch came floating in through the window and René persisted in trying to talk with her, Emilienne took the antique toys out the front door and smashed them one by one, until the porch was covered in tiny flecks of colored glass, fabric, and porcelain.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Emilienne did everything she promised herself she would do as a wife, though she could hardly be confused with any of the other wives in the neighborhood — the sort of women who, before marriage, had spent their high-school years practicing their penmanship by signing their first names with their future husband’s last. Wives who spent their days cleaning and going to the market and collecting interesting tidbits for a dinner tête-à-tête. Wives who met their husbands at the door with freshly painted lips and a conversation as thoughtfully prepared as the meal. Wives who did not begin their married lives as empty vases.
To her credit, Emilienne kept a clean house and fed her husband nightly meals of pot roasts and red potatoes; she fussed over the creases in his trousers, and she took diligent care of his cane, polishing it nightly so that the mahogany shone with a reddish hue. But neither Emilienne nor Connor ever once stopped to ponder the miracles love might bring into their lives. Connor because he didn’t know such things existed, and Emilienne because she did.
And then my mother was born.
She came into the world a screaming, demanding red nymph with a full head of black hair — all stick-straight but for one perfect ringlet at the back of her head — and infant blue eyes that would later darken to a brown so deep they sometimes seemed to have swallowed the iris whole. They named her Viviane.
When they brought her home, Emilienne carried her through the house and grimaced at her husband as he announced each room with the zest and gusto of a circus ringmaster. And on your left, what is this you ask? This grand stretch of carpeted interior space? Why it’s the second-floor hallway! He introduced Viviane to the kitchen’s cast-iron sink, the built-in cabinets with lead-glass doors that stretched along the dining-room wall and above the stove. He watched Viviane’s face to see if she loved the creak of the wood floors as he did. They took her into their bedroom, where he pointed out the tiny wicker bassinet where she would sleep and the rocking chair in which Emilienne would rock her every night until the floor under it was marked with wear. He showed her the garden, where a solid river rock marked a small burial site, and the parlor, where a harpsichord sat unused yet remarkably in tune. He showed her everything but the third floor, since no one went up there anyway.