Rain Village (30 page)

“What is it?” he asked, taking my hands in his. “Why don’t you talk to me?”

I just stared at the twins, at Masha practicing the stilts while Sergei watched. The words beat at me, but I could not say them. I looked up at his beautiful face, his black eyes.

“Why do you like me?” I blurted.

“What do you mean?” He was genuinely shocked. “Tessa, I love you. You know I love you.”

“Don’t you think I’m a freak?” I asked, without even thinking.

“Why would I love a woman I thought was a freak? What are you talking about? I don’t even think that way in the first place.”

I could feel my face flushing. “What about Clementine?” I whispered. “Isn’t she one?”

Mauro’s face eased. He laughed out loud and pulled me to him. “
Eres celosa!
Jealous!” He leaned back and looked at me. “Please do not be jealous of her,” he said. “That was long ago and so unimportant. Not nearly so important as what we have. I am proud of you, Tessita, how beautiful you are, how talented. You are small,
sí.
Perfectly so, like a piece of embroidery. Clementine was not for me. If she had been, we would have married.”

“Married?”

“But I didn’t marry her. And not because of people like the Vadalas.
Because it wasn’t right; she wasn’t right for me.” I looked up at him. His face shifted and got soft. “And besides, I want to marry you.”

I was suddenly aware of the landscape outside, the lush green grass and the mountains hovering around us on all sides. I could feel the hazy summer air, the trees and grass. The sharp scent of the sawdust.

“What?” I whispered, foolishly.

Mauro cleared his throat. “I planned to do this later this week, Tessita, but now how can I wait?” He smiled. “You’re lucky I don’t trust anyone enough to keep this on the train.” He pulled a twinkling diamond ring from his pocket and slipped it on my finger. “Will you marry me?” I saw that his hands were shaking.

“Yes!” I cried. “Yes!”

The Kriminov Twins stopped and looked up at us. The lion tamer looked up. Carlos, standing near the opening of the tent with the elephant girl, looked up. So did Ana and Bici the clown and a Polish contortionist with fake yellow hair, Petra.

The whole day turned dizzy and light. Mauro leapt up the bleachers and balanced himself on the outer edge. He shifted back and forth on the ledge and shouted down, for all the big top to hear: “
TESSA RILEY IS GOING TO MARRY ME! WE ARE GOING TO BE MARRIED!
”

Mauro rushed down and scooped me up in his arms, then flipped me up in the air. I had never seen him so silly. Within minutes word had gotten out, and Lollie was there beside me, roused from a lazy game of cards in the cookhouse, along with other friends.

That night we celebrated after the show, dancing around the fires outside the train car, opening bottles of champagne that Carlos had run into town to get. The corks popped off and the champagne shimmered down into our plastic glasses. Lollie raised her glass again and again to us, getting more misty each time. Had I been more grounded that
night, I might have paid more attention when Geraldo didn’t even show up, and I might have seen how sad Lollie was, underneath the surface of things.

The next morning it was in all the local papers, and there we were, in a photo someone had taken: Mauro and I, side by side, he towering over me as I sparkled up at the camera in my rhinestone leotard.
Circus Royalty to Wed,
a headline read. “Tiny Tessa, 18, famous for her one-arm swing-over, and Mauro Ramirez, 22, of the Ramirez Brothers tightrope act, announce engagement.”

There we were. I thought for a moment of Mercy Library, all the newspapers and documents stored in the file cabinets downstairs, where I had first seen my name in print alongside my mother’s, father’s, brothers’ and sister’s. This photo seemed to blot out all of it. With a fluttering heart, I clipped out the article carefully and put it into a file alongside all the other articles from that first season, when, for me, the whole world was remade.

We were married the following winter in Mexico City. Returning to the villa was like coming home. I hugged Luis like a long-lost brother—my
real
brother, not the ones I’d been born with. I embraced Mrs. Ramirez as if she were my true mother. Paulo’s Serena and baby, Pilar, had moved into the house earlier in the fall, and we all rushed to see the beautiful fat baby with tiny gold hoops dangling from her ears.

Mrs. Ramirez and Victoria oversaw the design and making of the intricate lace dress I wore at our wedding, and Mauro and I were married before a gold-covered altar with the Virgen de la Macarena in front. Carlos gave me away. Lollie and Serena and Mrs. Ramirez stood in a line next to Mauro as I walked up to him, a bouquet of white gardenias in my hand. The other brothers formed a line on the right.

As I walked toward Mauro, so handsome in his traditional black suit, I had to force myself to walk in long, graceful steps, to keep my veil and train in place and not yank off the lace and run, laughing, right into his arms.

I was happy, happier than I’d ever been. For the first time happiness was a condition of my world, not a moment that sparked and burned away. I loved being married to Mauro. During my second season, when the Velasquez Circus grew even more popular and well loved, he kept me centered. He formed a cocoon around me as reporters became more and more common on the lot and people began waiting in lines that wrapped three times around the tent to get in.

The years passed in a dizzying array of colors, a thousand colors flashing and sparkling along endless horizons. I practiced less and less and spent more time with my new husband, my family. I continued to work on the rope and hoop. I increased the number of swing-overs I could do at one time to nearly two hundred and began working more on the rope ladder and silks. As for the flying trapeze, I just let it go. I worked so well alone in the air, it didn’t seem necessary to punish my body and heart anymore, to fling myself into empty space again and again and feel that cold fear erupt inside me. I was happy now; I didn’t need to claw my way through whatever it was inside me that would not let me just
go.

Paulo didn’t mind by then either. He married Serena and brought her and Pilar on the road with us. Before long they had a second child, Eduardo, born my third winter in Mexico. Lollie doted on Pilar and Eduardo, who seemed to calm her anxious, starved heart, and Paulo and Serena seemed to be made for each other, always laughing as they wandered the lot with their toddling babies. Even José found happiness with
Ana’s older sister Bettina Vadala, who confessed her attraction to him one night after too many glasses of homemade sangria by the fire.

So time passed, and though I still woke sometimes certain that I could smell Mary’s scents of clove and cinnamon, calling me to the past and the future, I just let them sweep by.

One night during my fourth season with the circus, a knock came at my door as I prepared for an evening show. We were somewhere in the middle of the country, outside Kansas City—close enough to Oakley that I probably should have been a little nervous, but I had begun to feel immune to the outside world by then, I guess. If not for my name emblazoned on the door and the sheaf of articles that had been printed about me in newspapers and magazines, no one would have recognized me as the same Tessa Riley who had scrunched down into knots and crept through the fields of Riley Farm.

I opened the door and thought I was looking into a crazy funhouse mirror, the kind that could shrink you down to one foot or stretch you out to the size of a building, depending on your angle. There outside my door stood a girl with my face—the same rounded eyes and bow-shaped mouth, the same sloping nose—but about three times my size, as if I’d expanded overnight.

The girl looked at me with even more shock than I felt.

“Tessa?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, looking at her.

It hit me like a slap. It was a moment I’d dreaded ever since I’d first seen my image on the posters that were splashed through every
town on the circus’s route. She was different and yet the same as I remembered.

“Geraldine?” I asked, my mouth hanging open.

And I had the sudden, sinking, grief-stricken sense that all of life had passed me by.

She had come to make peace with me, she said. We sat in my dressing room, I on the chair by my vanity and she on the tiny sofa shoved against one wall. She had slimmed down over the years. I was surprised at the delicacy of her fingers, fine long fingers that cultivated orchids and other blooms in a flower shop in Kansas City, as she later told me.

I could not believe it. Geraldine grown, sitting in front of me, an almost elegant woman with long-fingered hands that would never spoon sugar straight from the bag and into her mouth.

“You left Oakley?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “as soon as I could. Not too long after you left, Tessa.”

“I always thought you would be the same,” I managed to get out, “that all of you would be the same.”

“Things changed a lot after you went away,” she said. “Dad never spoke another word to anyone, just sat on that stupid chair and rocked himself to death. Mom cried and howled all those last months, but once Dad died, she became a new person entirely. It was as if she’d been freed, and she started letting other farmers court her, and then Mr. Briggs from down the road moved in with us. He seemed okay, but that’s around when I left.”

She took a breath and stopped. Geraldine seemed nervous sitting there with me, as if she were afraid to sit in silence for one second. I did not know what to say to her. She was like a ghost out of some other
life—a life that still had the power to devastate me and strike me down, no matter how far I traveled away from it.

“Oh, these are for you,” she said quickly, handing me a small bouquet I had not noticed before then.

I looked down at the exquisite arrangement of lilacs and daffodils, then stood awkwardly to find a jar to put them in. I could not look at Geraldine’s face as I brushed past the couch to the bathroom faucet.

When I stepped back into the room, Geraldine was staring at the cosmetics littering my vanity, the couple of sequined caps tossed to the side, the pot of glitter next to the smooth silver hairbrush with my name engraved on the handle.

Geraldine met my eyes then and smiled quickly before looking down. “She missed you, you know,” she said then. “I mean, I know they weren’t the greatest parents or anything, but Mom cried for days when you went away. She kept saying she’d failed you.”

Slashes of pain went through me as I let her words sink in. “What about Dad?” I asked, after several moments.

“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what he thought or felt. He was always going off by himself, you remember, and then at a certain point he stopped talking at all.”

She looked at me.

“Why did you leave us?” she asked after a long pause, her face twisting slightly.

We sat in silence for several minutes then. I didn’t know what to say, just stared at her tapered shoes. “Was it Dad?” she whispered.

I looked up at her, searching her face. “It was everything,” I said finally. “I couldn’t stay there.”

“It’s okay, Tessa,” Geraldine said, and reached out for my hand. “I know you were sad at home. I knew things weren’t right, somehow, for
you. I always hoped you were okay after you left. I would try to imagine where you were.”

I was surprised to see her crying, and even more surprised to feel the tears sliding down my own cheeks.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“You’re my only sister,” she said. “I wondered if you thought about us, knew what happened to us the way we knew about you, all this time. I mean, we saw you in the papers. We saw pictures of you on the trapeze. We saw pictures of you when you were married.”

My whole world seemed to shift over one notch more with each thing she said. “I never thought you could see me when I couldn’t see you,” I whispered. “It was always the opposite, when I was growing up.”

“I felt that way, too,” Geraldine said, “when we were growing up. I felt invisible, though I was hideous and gigantic, and I could never hold myself in the way I wanted to.”

“Really?” I said.

She nodded, smiling at me.

“I’d see that woman Mary sometimes when Mom took me to town, and even though Mom yanked me away and got furious at me, I’d stare at Mary and imagine spending time with her like you did. I was always jealous of you back then. I was so lumbering and slow, and you could run for miles.”

“You remember her?” I asked quietly. “Really?”

“Of course,” she said. “I remember the first time I heard of her. Mom was yelling at Dad and saying he couldn’t bring books into the house. She always thought they’d had an affair. God, she talked about it enough.”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering that long-ago day. “I remember.”

“She got so mad sometimes thinking about you working there, but she wouldn’t dare say anything. I mean, with the money, and Dad.”

“Did he ever say anything?”

“No,” she said. “He never did.”

She looked to the ground for a second, and suddenly I just knew. “Geraldine,” I asked slowly, “did Dad take you out in the fields, too?”

The room was silent for several long moments. Her shoulders crumpled, and she bent her head down.

“I never knew,” I whispered. “I thought it was only me.”

“I don’t know what was wrong with him, Tessa,” she said, looking up. “Why he was like that. Mom was always worried about Mary Finn and every other beautiful woman, but it was us. Just us.”

“But why?” I asked, knowing, of course, that Geraldine didn’t have the answers any more than I did. And yet it was the first time I was able to just ask that question, in all its purity:
Why?

She shook her head. “Look at you now, though,” she said, smiling shyly. “Going all over the place, a circus star! When I first saw you in the paper, I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to jump up and down.”

Her smile was genuine, spreading across her face. I smiled back at her. I couldn’t place my feelings exactly, and didn’t try. I thought how the world works in messy, imprecise ways, smashing itself together when you want to keep it apart, breaking into a thousand slivers when all you want is peace.