Rain Village (21 page)

Even Lollie longed to hear about Mary, though she herself had felt Mary’s life throughout the years. I came to understand that Lollie had felt Mary’s life in bits, in slivers of images or scents or dreams, not in whole slices as if she’d been there. For Lollie, the world was not open and transparent, like a sheet of glass. Every seer has lapses and gaps, I would learn, moments when the world does not offer itself but lies as flat as a sketch before her. Lollie could feel Mary’s heart in moments, feel her leafing through books and shuffling through documents that she would drop into thick files, feel her staring out the library windows during all those long hours she was alone, remembering the feel of rain streaming down her skin, the tang of the river, the mud that sucked at her feet, the pattering and plinking that never stopped. Lollie had felt the pain that had pulsed through Mary’s veins, but I, who had been right there with her, hadn’t understood or seen it at all.

How could I put her into words? How could I describe the way she walked into a room, the way she boiled cabbage and ham for our lunches, the way she picked me out in front of the courthouse and told me about the star particles in my fingernails? Or the way the stale smell of books and papers and ink was part of what she had been for me, along with the thousands of words and phrases and stories we had shared, the spooky old ballads, the stories of unhappy peasant girls and of boys coming
into the world for the first time, the long, meandering scenes set in meadows spotted with wildflowers. She had given me language that could describe feeling and beauty and love, but I could not use it to bring her back to me. And it would not make up for the fact that she was, like everything else, fading away—and no huddle of words could take her place.

When I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her, I saw a woman with ice-ravaged skin, soaking in a bath of cinnamon-scented water.

I could not remember her as I’d known her.

I stayed in bed as Lollie spread glitter through her hair and across her skin, and during her performance that night. I watched the lights bobbing up and down through my window.

Later, Lollie brought sandwiches to me that I let dry up on their plates. When she came in and out of my compartment, she did not make a sound.

“I think I am dying,” I whispered to Lollie as she moved through the room.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “But you aren’t. You are a strong girl, Tessa. You are stronger than she was, even.”

The circus played in Kansas City for only three nights before moving on. On the third night, after the last show, the roustabouts swarmed around the tent and tore it down. From the train car, I watched the big top fall like a cake just out of the oven. I had my small sack of things with me in Lollie’s compartment, but everyone else seemed to become part of a military operation—tearing apart makeshift camps, pulling in lines of laundry stretching from the train windows to the trees outside, dismantling the tents and booths in the midway, compressing everything into the trucks the sideshow traveled in or onto the circus wagons that would be hoisted from the ground to the flatcars using ramps and rigging. They had it down to a science: when those trucks and wagons were packed tight, I’m not sure a penny could have traveled from one end of the car to another without getting stuck somewhere.

It would be the last time I would sit around on a night like that, not knowing what to do with myself. Everyone pitched in, even Lollie and her brothers and Flying Geraldo. I heard voices everywhere and watched, fascinated, as the whole miniature city outside my window folded itself up under the moonlight and disappeared. The Ferris wheel collapsed and the lights popped off and the train shifted and expanded like a living thing.

Less elaborate, the midway took half the time to tear down, and, one by one, the sideshow trucks—some of them plain, others draped in banners and painted with lurid advertisements for the performers inside—roared off into the darkness.

I was lured out of the train car into the night, despite myself, just as they were loading the menagerie back onto the flatbeds. The whole night was filled with voices and the scratching and squealing of wagons being pulled across metal planks. By then most of the cars had been loaded back onto the train—filled with the equipment, the tents and big top, the cookhouse, the seat wagons and stock cars, all stacked before the performers’ cars, which varied wildly in size and quality—and the only thing left was to drop the menagerie tent and roll the animal’s cages back onto the flatbeds, too. No one even seemed to see me as I slipped from the steps to the ground.

The roustabouts shouted and pulled while others scoured the lot for anything left behind or started piling into the cars. The menagerie was the most difficult part to load, out of everything, and other men stepped forward to help push and pull up the wagons with the big cats and then lead in the two elephants, who strained the ropes so badly I thought the cords would break. It was spooky, looking out over the empty, dark field, the autumn leaves scattered in patches over the grass. It gave me the feeling I was completely alone in the world. The roars and bellows of the animals seemed surreal, like something out of a dream.

“Tessa!” a voice called, and I looked over to see Lollie approaching the car. I was suddenly terrified: She’s going to ask me to leave now, I thought. I remembered what she’d said to Geraldo, and my heart stopped.
Just for a day or two.

She wore working clothes that were smeared with dirt. “You’re up! We were loading the rigging; you can never trust these guys to do it right. Are you feeling better?”

I nodded and stared at her, afraid to speak.

“Well, we can settle in, then. You’re coming with us to the next place, no?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved. Yes.

I went back into the little room. Soon I could feel the train wheeze to a start, then lurch into a steady, chugging rhythm. I sat on my little bed and stared out the window at the fading lot and the branches that seemed to reach out toward the train and try to grab us. It was mesmerizing: the forests and fields, the little towns and cities, all of them blurring past on the outside, lit by the moon or streetlamps, while I sat snug on the bed, alone in the dark.

I heard a tapping on the door, and Lollie walked in. “Why don’t you turn a light on in here?” She laughed.

“I like it this way,” I said. “Looking out the window. It feels safe.”

She smiled, then came over and sat on the bed next to me. For a few minutes we sat in silence, staring out the window at the rushing branches, the looming trees. The train chugged and rumbled under us.

I knew I had to say something, stake my claim. “Lollie,” I said finally, “how can I be part of the circus? I want to stay here, to perform.”

“Perform?”

“Mary taught me a lot. I can do the trapeze and some rope stuff. I can twirl and do tricks, hang from my knees and ankles.”

She didn’t seem convinced. “Well, you know,” she said, after a long pause, “that may take time. Normally people don’t just start performing unless they were born to it. But there are plenty of ways to join the circus: cleaning the horses, selling candy, helping the roustabouts . . . though you might be a bit young for that, a bit small.”

The town outside seemed to whoosh by. The streetlamps blurred together and made me blink.

“But Mary did,” I said. “She joined the circus. From outside.”

“That’s true,” she said. “But not at first. She had to practice and learn, and she did menial work before she got up there in the ring.” She paused and pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “So you learned the trapeze, did you? From her?”

I nodded. I was dying to tell her about the space we’d made between the shelves, the magic of that trapeze gliding back and forth under the wooden ceiling beams, but I kept silent.

“Well, why don’t you show us what you can do, then? After we set up tomorrow, before the show? In the meantime, we can maybe talk to Mr. Velasquez about keeping you on for a bit, helping out. It’s a lot of hard work, though, Tessa, and we’re constantly moving.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind at all. I have nowhere else to go.”

She laughed and leaned into me. “Maybe you’re more of a circus girl than I thought.”

That night I barely slept, between the clanging and bumping and the nervousness that took hold in my gut. I knew that Lollie was humoring me, but I was determined to show her that I was good enough to perform—and determined to make myself as indispensable as possible. I stared out the window at the fleeting towns and countryside. As soon as the train screeched to a halt early the next morning, somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, I leapt out of bed, ready to work.

Oklahoma seemed like another world. Oakley and Kansas City were the only places I knew, and on the new lot the landscape seemed scrubbed dry, reddish in spots. The world seemed wider, sadder, but within minutes we put our stamp upon it, and then it was transformed.

We worked all morning. The wagons were rolled off the flatcars and the menagerie was reassembled outside the tent for townfolk to exclaim
over for the price of a quarter. I heard the lions and elephants and shivered with excitement—nothing could make me feel farther away from Oakley than that sound.

We ate lunch in the cookhouse, tired and sweaty, having helped to remake the lot until it seemed like that land had always had a huge blue tent rising out of it, a Ferris wheel whirring next to the sky.

“So,” Lollie said, setting down her fork, “Tessa is going to show us her trapeze skills a little later. In an hour, maybe?” She looked at me. “That should give us time before the show.”

I could feel my face turn red, feel all their eyes on me.

There was silence, and then Mauro was the one who spoke. “Great,” he said, winking at me. The rest of them kept eating. I glanced up and saw both José and Ana look quickly away.

I would later learn how opposed they all were to letting in someone new, how they saw themselves as inhabitants of the air and everyone outside the circus as rooted in the earth, like vines.

That hour crawled by. I locked myself in my compartment and stretched my legs and torso, moved my arms around to get them loose and burning. For the first time, I wondered what I would do—what I could possibly do—if I failed. I thought of all the months I’d wasted in Kansas City, and cursed myself.

When the time came, I changed into the leotard Mary had given me and entered the big top.

The trapeze swooped up above me, right in the center of empty space. I would have to climb a long ladder to a platform to reach it. I was used to Mary’s trapeze, hanging from a beam in a jam-packed library, and the length of rope hanging from a tree by the river—not this elaborate
contraption made of metal and pulleys, stretching down from the top of the tent, swinging in empty space. A gleaming silver net stretched out underneath like something hauled up from the sea.

My whole body was shaking. I looked up at Lollie and all her brothers, and noticed then how many more people were gathering close to the tent.

I had to do it, to go up there. If I could just catch the bar, I’d be fine.

Lollie looked at me. “Go on. You can’t be shy here,” she said.

“Privacy is something you have to give up,” Carlos said, winking at me. “Especially if you come as a friend of Marionetta’s.”

Outside, I could hear the midway starting up, the people beginning to come in. The air had that electric quality, and I could hear the buzzing of the lights, the Ferris wheel spinning round.

This was my one chance.

The bird girl Clementine was in the tent now, I saw, talking to Mauro. Ana and her family stood huddled on the other side. I caught Ana’s eye and she waved, just as the Kriminov Twins, a brother-and-sister team from Romania, slipped in and sat on the bleachers.

“Don’t worry,” Paulo whispered, leaning down. “They’re all curious because of Marionetta. Just show us what you can do.”

I breathed in. I went to the ladder and climbed up, feeling as if someone else were navigating that thin, narrow contraption instead of me. Slowly, rung by rung, I watched the ground pull away, woozily.

As I stepped onto the platform, I swooned for a second, with nausea.

Paulo climbed onto the platform opposite. He reached out and grabbed the trapeze. “Hep!” he called, throwing it out to me.

His voice was the first thing that threw me off. I reached for the bar, leaping out a second too late. For a moment there was nothing in the world but that bar looming in front of me—until I looked down at
the net. I hesitated again, froze, and when I lunged for the bar, I was several seconds too late. My hands stretching out, I fell down to the net, which reached up and smacked my neck and face and legs.

“Are you okay?” Lollie rushed over. “Are you hurt?”

The ropes burned and slashed my skin. I couldn’t think.

Mauro pulled the net back and leapt into it, then swept me up and into him.

“Can you move your neck, Tessa?” he whispered, looking right down at me. Even in a state like that—burning with shame, bruised and cut—I was taken aback by him, his beauty. When I didn’t answer, he cupped his hand under my neck and pressed his fingertips into my skin, cradling my head with his other hand. He gently moved my head back and forth, then reached over and patted down my legs. The only man I had ever been that close to was my father. I stared up at him, confused.

“She’s fine,” he pronounced, looking down at everyone to the sides. I didn’t realize then how badly the net could hurt you, if you took a bad fall into it. Coming at you in the wrong way, the rope could feel like tiny knives. If you fell at the wrong angle, it could break your neck.

At that moment I could barely feel anything but his palm under my skin.

“You’re okay, Tessita,” he said. “You want to get out of this thing?”

I nodded, and with one long shift of his body he moved both of us to the side, then held me to his chest with one arm as we jumped down to the ground.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lollie said, comforting me. “You’re not used to the big top. You can try again in a few days.”