Rain Village (25 page)

Restless, I slipped on a robe and tiptoed through the hallways, feeling the cool tile under my bare feet. The crosses scattered throughout the house, the twisting wrought-iron railings and candle holders, the earthenware vases filled with roses and other flowers, the sparkling costumes that hung in closets and across doorways and on the line that stretched over the back porch—all of it looked different in the sleeping house, lit only by a faint moon through the open windows.

I let my hands glide over the railings and the walls as I walked from room to room, then past the pool. I plucked a lemon from one of the shimmery trees and turned it over in my hand. I thought of Luis as a
young man, falling falling to the ground. I thought of Lollie listening to the screams from the trailer, and I imagined how her heart must have exploded in her chest.

“Nothing before this matters,” I whispered, into air.

With every corner I turned, I was convinced I heard the whisper of spirits. Moonlight dappled the walls, a breeze moved through the room, the crosses throughout the house seemed heavy with meaning. Back in Oakley the world had been flat and stark; here it was filled with memory, story, spirit, and all the colors of the circus and the lemons and roses. I could not stop thinking of Luis falling to the ground, the way he sat by the pool each evening as splendid as a sun.

I walked from room to room, breathing in the scent of the jasmine, imagining the feel of the bar under my hands, myself flying over everything. The memory of it pressed against my palms. It was strange to reconcile the quiet lushness of the house with the clean, precise feeling of flight, my limbs cutting through air and forcing it to sweep from my body in waves. A different feeling took hold of me. The house, the moon, the quiet—it all seeped into me until I had so much energy I could hardly stand it, despite the soreness of my limbs, my ravaged muscles and cracked skin. I thought how I had no body, no father, nothing before what I was right then, and I began running through the hallways, racing right through them as if I could not be contained by anything. I felt absolutely weightless then in a way I had never felt on earth, on the ground—as light as pure air, pure feeling and desire. The breath in my lungs felt like glass. This is all that matters, I thought: the clean feeling of air slicing open.

The days and weeks passed, and the new season loomed before me. I wore my body down to the bone and quickly mastered the new movements Lollie showed me. At practice I had a much easier time with the rope than the flying trapeze. Lollie and Paulo were both appalled to learn that I’d used only the thick rope from a barn and a hardware store before, and that my wrists were scarred from the countless sores that had opened because of it. Paulo threw away my own rope and insisted I work with the
corde lisse,
the long braided rope all aerialists used. With a swivel and a ring, he attached a padded rope loop to the
corde lisse
for me to slip my hand through to do the swing-overs. The difference was amazing: the trick was still difficult, still required a complete shoulder rotation, but the padded loop made my grasp on the rope more sure and protected my palm and wrist. Suddenly I was able to do fifty swing-overs at one time, sometimes sixty or more.

“Beautiful!” Lollie would call out. “Just keep the leg straight as you turn, lean your body in.”

I learned to keep my shoulder close to the rope to control the movement, to polish the violent, angry thrusting of the river and the boardinghouse in Kansas City.

“Here it is about creating poetry in the air, not throwing yourself around without even thinking. The more you harness that energy,
chica,
the more disciplined you make each movement, the more magical you will be. An
artista.
”

Every day Lollie, Paulo, and I drove to the big top at dawn. I worked on the ropes each morning before the long afternoons on the trapeze. I came to understand that the Ramirezes had wanted a solo aerialist in their act for a long time but that it was a touchy thing, bringing a new aerialist into an established act, especially when egos like Lollie’s and Geraldo’s were concerned, not to mention the brothers’. But I was much less of a threat than the sinewy aerialists from the Russian and European circuses the Ramirezes had spoken with. I was so different from Lollie in the air, my quick, strong movements a striking contrast to her more silken, flowing ones. Lollie evoked romance and languor and lushness while I was all raw power and blurring, spinning movement.

“Eventually we can integrate so that you, I, Geraldo, and Paulo can do one long flying act together,” Lollie said.

“You are a gift to us from Marionetta,” I heard Carlos comment more than once.

Once Paulo and Lollie felt I had the swing-over under control—the centerpiece of my act, they both agreed—they began to teach me other solo acts. The hoop, a bar with semicircles rising from the top and bottom, that spun around, making it seem like you were enclosed in a beautiful bubble. The Roman rings, the two small rings hanging from two cords that I could work like a gymnast, performing numerous tests of strength. The long rope ladder that let you do all kinds of tricks while ascending and descending through the air.

I took to all of these acts much more easily and readily than to the flying trapeze. Despite all the hours and days and weeks we spent on the trapeze, I hadn’t been able to master it. I could not catch Paulo’s hands
and pull my body to the opposite platform. I’d panic, looking down to see that his hands were there, and ruin the trick. I’d either miss it completely or grab his hands clumsily, breaking a clean line or luxurious spin.

What I could do was leap to the Roman rings, pull myself up until my arms shot straight across on either side, and then hang for many minutes, steady and sure, as if I were just relaxing on one of the lounge chairs by the pool. My muscles were unbelievably strong from Mary’s library, the river, and the bar in the kitchen window. Of course it helped that I was so small, that my muscles probably outweighed all my skin and bones and blood put together. Lollie could not stay up in the iron cross for more than thirty seconds, her body shaking the whole time.

“I have never seen anyone take to the air so quickly,” she said to me one evening as we drove back to the villa. “I almost think Mary passed something on to you in that crazy library. Some people can pass memories or dreams from one body to the next, you know. Maybe that was Mary’s power, the reason everyone who saw her fell in love with her.”

Paulo glanced over at me from the driver’s seat. “I believe it,” he said. “But it also comes from your bones, like Luis always says.”

I laughed as the heavy night air blew against my skin from the open window.

I felt, for the first time, that I belonged somewhere. Carlos, Mauro, Luis, José, and Paulo were like brothers to me, kissing my cheeks in the morning and at night, making sure I had enough to eat and was never by myself in the city or on the roads surrounding the villa. Victoria taught me to make
flan
and her special
mole,
laughing with me in the kitchen over the huge industrial stove.

But despite everything, Mary was often there, around the edges—not the woman I had known and loved but a reminder, a sense that I had
left something undone. Like everyone else in my life, she was split off, between the woman I had known and the woman who stayed with me. And she was separate from everything. As close as I became to Lollie or Luis, I could not tell them about the way Mary haunted me or what it had felt like to spend those long days with her in the library, listening to her voice or watching her brew tea on the stove. I could not tell them about the opal ring that I kept hidden in my room, sewn back up in a skirt, or what it had felt like to come upon her in the river.

And no matter how happy I was, how in love I was with Mexico and the circus, I still dreamt of rain. Some nights I woke with my heart pounding in my chest, longing to leave Mexico and to find Rain Village, which must have been a million miles from the house and the pool and the trees that dropped lemons to the ground. I heard Mary’s voice in my ear, thought of the riverboat that snaked up the thin river, how the sky must turn black as the riverboat neared. I saw the thousand colors of the opal ring sparkling up from her neck. I felt a darkness swooping over me, threatening to pull me to the river’s bottom, threatening to fill my lungs and drown me.

I would hear her voice in my ear, wrapping around me the way her scent had once.

“There’s a secret there,” she would say. “I want you to find it.”

It was late February when Lollie announced that we had to begin preparing my costume for the new season. We were sipping coffee at the big table in the early morning, getting ready for another long day of rehearsal. All of us were there. It was a normal morning: the sky was hung over a bit with rain, we were quiet and tired, and Victoria had set out a large bowl of mangoes and oranges with a pot of steaming coffee.
I was slathering my toast with butter when Lollie said, “I think we should make you a costume covered with rhinestones, Tessa, so that you’ll look like a diamond in the air.”

I looked up at her. I had almost forgotten that our time in Mexico was a rest stop for the winter and that the day was approaching for us to gather up the circus and head north, where we would pick up the rest of the acts and start the new season.

“You’re ready,” Lollie said, smiling over the table at me. “Maybe not for the flying trapeze, but your solo act is more than ready.”

I looked to Paulo, who agreed.

“We want your solo act to be part of our main act,” Lollie said. “We can work it out with Jorge, your pay and your sleeping arrangements.”

I nodded, speechless.

“We can negotiate more then,” Carlos said. He turned to me. “We can probably get you twenty dollars a week for now. Jorge, Mr. Velasquez, pays me one lump sum for all of us in the Ramirez acts, and I divvy it up. That should be fair for you and increase profit for all of us. We’re a strong act already—the two star acts of the show—but you’ll make us even stronger.”

“Does that sound fair to you, Tessa?” Lollie asked.

“Yes,” I said, overcome. This was more money than I’d ever thought I’d make, anywhere. I would have traveled with the Ramirezes for free.

“We need a name for you, then,” Carlos said, clapping his hands and looking around the table.

“What’s wrong with Tessa?” I asked.

Mauro shook his head. “Something more.”

“Tiny Tessa!” Luis said suddenly. He sat at the head of the table, his wheelchair pulled up to it. “How about that?”

I giggled, clapping my hand over my mouth.

“Bueno!”
Lollie laughed, nodding vigorously and spreading her hands out dramatically in the air. “You will be the tiny trapeze girl who glitters like a perfect diamond in the air, a gem in the center of our act.”

I looked at all of them. “Thank you,” was all I could manage, and I looked down at my coffee.

Luis leaned toward me. “You are going to be magnificent,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

I looked up at Luis, and at Mauro’s sweet face and Lollie’s open one, the pride beaming through it, and was almost heartbroken. It was too much, all of this—how could I trust any of it? I had thought that Mary had loved me once, too.

Mrs. Ramirez and Victoria worked on my costume for a week straight. They sat in the main den downstairs with a bowl of rhinestones set on the table between them. They sewed each one onto the soft white fabric by hand, then stuck me through with pins in the evenings as they molded the fabric to my skin.

“More rhinestones!” Mrs. Ramirez cried, then plucked the fabric off my body and got back to work.

At night I would go look at my costume, pure white and sparkling in the moonlight, like snow and ice and frost, and I’d close my eyes and think of the spinning girl in my vision. Gleaming, rotating around and around until you could no longer see the lines of her body, just pure light moving through space.

Two nights before we left Mexico for the new season, Mauro knocked on my door. He was dressed in a black suit and hat and held a bouquet of geraniums he’d plucked from the walls surrounding the villa.

“Tessa,” he said, before I could speak, “would you go to dinner with me tonight?”

I looked at him, confused. “But I always have dinner with you, Mauro,” I said.

“No, no,” he said, pushing the geraniums into my hand, “Not here. Outside. In the city.”

“Oh,” I said, blushing. “You mean . . .?” I didn’t know what to say.

“I want to take you to dinner, Tessa,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he said, looking at me from under his thick lashes. He was so handsome in his white shirt and dark suit, his hair slicked back with grease. In one quick movement he kissed my cheek, then left me there in the doorway.

I stood there for a full minute before it hit me that Mauro Ramirez had just asked me, Tessa Riley, out on a date. I touched my cheek where he had kissed me, my face burning, my hands trembling. This was not supposed to happen, I thought. This was not ever supposed to happen for a girl like me.

I dropped the flowers on my bed and raced to the shower. My heart pounded as I slicked shampoo through my hair and slapped scented soap over my skin, and I shook when I stepped in front of the mirror, glaring at my flat body. I rubbed my hair with a towel, leaned into the glass and stared right into my own eyes, blue and wild with fear and excitement.

What to wear seemed like the biggest decision of my life. I yanked out shirt after shirt from my closet—old ragged ones I’d worn in the factory, sweet embroidered ones sewn by Mrs. Ramirez—but everything seemed wrong, dull. Finally I pulled out the rhinestone-lined skirt Mary had made for me for my thirteenth birthday, and slipped it on with a tight white top. The effect was not too bad, I thought, staring into the
mirror. My skin looked tan against the white, and I looked summery, like I should be sipping lemonade. Still, I cursed my ridiculous body, my pinched face. I wanted to weep and cry out with excitement, all at once.