Rain Village (35 page)

I couldn’t stop the guilt that came over me then, that horrible sense that I had failed Mauro, and Mary, and everyone. That I could have saved her.

As we made our way north, the trees expanded and grew so tall we could see only the trunks from the train, giant pillars whole families could fit into. I sat back and stared out at them, the snow you
could see glittering in the distance. I remembered how giant everything had felt when I was growing up, how my parents and sister and brothers had seemed to tower over me, to fill up whole rooms. “Look,” I said to Costas, pointing to the trees.

“It’s like we’ve entered a fairytale,” he said.

He leaned back and I smiled at him. “I wonder what Rain Village is like,” I said. “She always made it sound so magical.”

The sun caught his eyes and lit them bright green. Suddenly I wondered how different my life would be with someone like him. It seemed astonishing, sometimes, how much the world could change, depending on where you were and who the person was next to you. I imagined what my life would be like if I lived in Turkey and Greece, had hair thick with salt.

For a second I thought Costas would kiss me. His face was so close to mine. His eyes moved down my face, to my lips. The light shifted then, and I saw my face in the window behind him. His eyes went dark again, and I turned away, swallowing. Don’t lose your head, I thought. It would be too easy to think I was someone else.

Hours passed in a strange sort of haze. Costas slept next to me. I looked back out at the landscape, watched it become green, luminous. My thoughts returned to Mary, to what I was trying to find. We were in her world now, I realized. After all this time. As the train crossed the countryside I could practically see the clear air turn to mist, the ground become soaked with water. When we started heading still farther west, the whole world lit like an emerald, and the trees seemed to tap the sky.

I wondered if this was what Mary had seen when she’d left Rain Village, tears streaming down her face and trailing out behind her: these trees, this falling rain, these little towns that seemed equal parts wood and mist.

“Why did your mother leave Rain Village?” I asked Costas in those
endless hours as we sat side by side staring at the wet landscape. “Was it because of her father?”

“I only know what my father told me,” he said. “I never knew her at all, you know. But she said her father beat her and hurt her and that no one said a word about it. And that one day she finally left. She wandered all over the world, he said, before she and my father fell in love.”

“What happened to her?”

“One day right after I was born, she walked into the ocean and kept on walking.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, breathing in. “That’s terrible. She drowned? Like Mary did? Like William, too?”

“I guess,” he said. “William?”

“The one Mary was in love with. The reason she left.”

He looked confused. “I don’t know about William,” he said. “What happened?”

“I just know that he drowned. That Mary was in love with him and he drowned, and she left soon after, went out into the world. I don’t think she ever went back.”

“It is a hard thing,” he said, “to leave the place you come from.”

I thought of Oakley, the tree in the town square, the hedges that lined our yard. For a second I wondered if he was making fun of me. I looked up quickly, but he seemed to be somewhere else completely.

“You must have a lot of guilt,” he said. “To drown yourself after that. You know?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess so.” I was embarrassed to have never thought of it and looked down, tapped my foot on the seat in front of me.

Of course Mary had felt guilty. Every time I thought of her, she seemed to take on a new shape, a new dimension. I wondered if it was ever really possible to know someone else.

Day moved into night, and rain pounded against the train-car windows, hammering and beating down, never letting up for a minute. By the time we arrived at the tip of the country, it seemed like we would never see the sun again. The rain pounded down and the sky was like a sheet of rock as we boarded a small bus that would take us to the riverboat, the one Mary had described, and at long last into Rain Village. Time shifted and took on a new form. I had no time to gather my thoughts, but the world was always like that: no matter how much you prepared for something, there was always that moment when you had to leap off the platform and fly toward the catcher’s hands.

The bus was quick, and soon a strip of blue revealed itself. We pulled into a small dock. The sun poured onto the water like melted butter. The air seemed different there, somehow. Costas and I walked down to the water—quietly, as if we might wake something. We looked down and saw fish as big as watermelons. Trees circled the riverbank, and the leaves hung heavy with sunlight, casting a spell on the water.

She has been here, I thought. I could feel her presence. I imagined Mary leaving Rain Village so many years before, her tears falling in the water, the memory of William burned into her heart and breast. She would have walked from the riverboat to the dock and into the world for the first time. Right here. Soon Juan Galindo would find her, changing everything from that day forward.

I looked at Costas, my eyes filling with tears. “It feels like we’re at the end of the world,” I whispered. As if we were about to step off it. I thought of Mauro and the trapeze, of circus lights and glitter and the elephants’ swaying trunks, the tigers’ soft fur, the crazy banners and colors of the sideshow, the sawdust and cotton candy and miles of faces
staring up at us with astonished, blissful expressions, and wondered once again what I was doing in this huge, lonesome expanse where time seemed to have stopped. The rain seeped through my shirt, ran down my skin.

“I know,” he said, grabbing my hand. His touch comforted me. I hadn’t realized how rigid and tense I was.

When a boat appeared down the narrow path of the river, it seemed like a mirage. It shimmered through the leaves and rose straight up into the sky.

We stood together and watched the boat approach. It pulled to a stop with a heavy, wheezing groan, sank from our weight when we stepped on the deck. The captain took our bags and fare quietly before heading back to the helm. The few other passengers didn’t seem to pay us much mind.

I don’t know what kind of journey it was, really, that brought Costas and me to Rain Village. It did not feel like we were traveling the way a boat travels through the water; rather, we seemed to move the way a dream passes from loss to memory. I was inside the vision I’d had, when I’d first seen her, and Mary’s voice whispered in my ear. Was I a child again, listening to one of her stories? I sat on the deck of the riverboat, leaning my back against the railing, and the wood under my hands felt like the planks that made up the floor of Mercy Library.

The rain pattered against our skin, onto the deck and the water. The air was so delicate. Looking above me, I saw the rain lit up by the sun, and the leaves overhead were like petals, almost translucent with the sun coming down through them. I looked over at Costas, watched him change the film in his camera, lift the camera to his face.
He’s documenting this,
I realized then.
He wants to get it all down.
I thought of Mary standing in Mercy Library, surrounded by files and books.

We moved slowly down the river, watching the plants and trees and water, and then, in the distance, we saw people waiting on the shoreline. A burst of color in the melancholy landscape.

“Rain Village,” I whispered. I climbed up on the railing and held the top rail with my hands.

As we approached, I saw that the people were wearing shiny hats that kept the rain off their faces. I glanced at the other passengers, saw a woman with long hair so black it was like a pool of ink I’d dip a quill into, standing along the railing, waving. She glanced at me and smiled. I smiled back, then tilted my face up to let the mist of rain coat my face.

The boat bobbed on the water as we anchored at the bank, and the fish thumped against the sides of the boat. “Look at them,” Costas whispered, pointing.

The captain helped me down from the boat; my hand reached for the railing and my skirt grazed the water as I slid onto the riverbank. I stepped forward and nearly fell. When I took my second step my foot felt more assured, the mud less slippery, the riverbank more steady. I could feel the place closing over me, could almost smell the spiced oranges, feel the brush of dark coils of hair on my skin.

Our feet sank into the ground. We walked up the riverbank and onto the earth above it. People milled around us and headed toward a path lined by trees. I saw the woman from the boat, watched as her galoshes navigated the muddy paths effortlessly, as if she were walking barefoot over cement. She ran to a tall man and hugged him. His hair was the color of peanut shells. When his eye caught mine, I turned away, embarrassed.

I recognized other people from the riverboat moving alongside us, caught snippets of conversations about their trips. Costas smiled down at me and I thought how right he looked, being there. His long coat, his thin gypsy body. His eyes were the colors of the leaves drifting all around, hanging from the trees like feathers.

We began walking with everyone else, down a path surrounded by trees. The world, the trees, everything around us was so lush. Vibrant.
Soon the path opened onto a street, and Costas and I stopped in our tracks to take it all in: the twisting street lined with stores, people everywhere, the treetops jutting over the buildings like knife tips. The soft, glowing colors, the pinks and yellows and greens like hard candy piled in a bowl. I looked into the distance and saw small houses, their tipped roofs pointing to the sky.

We moved into the street, stepped up on the twisting sidewalk. Every block or so there was an opening between shops, revealing a path to the forest.

“We’re here,” I breathed, suddenly seized with joy.

The thrill of being there—seeing it all right there, straight from her voice and into the world—overtook me, made me mad with pleasure. I couldn’t drink it all in quickly enough. We passed a clothing store with bright jackets hanging in the window, a candy store lined with bins of licorice and chocolate. We passed a small grocery store crowded with people, several of whom met my eye as we went past and then quickly looked away. Many places sold fish, or rods and tackle, shimmery fish-shaped lures. One store only sold the rain hats I had seen people wearing. A tiny inn sat at the end of the street, like something from a fairytale.

It was all just as Mary had described. She’d told me about the street and the shops and the fishermen, the forest stretching behind everything. She must have been the same age as I was now, I thought, when she’d left. I imagined her standing here, the rain caressing her skin. How different it must have been for her to travel with the circus, I thought, and to fall in love with a dark-skinned man like Juan Galindo. How alive she must have felt.

We entered the inn, paid for two rooms for that night. The man at the front desk handed us our keys without a word. As I dropped my bag onto the bed, I found myself alone for the first time in days. I walked to
the window and stared out at the rain-soaked ground, the sturdy people walking past, oblivious to the water running down their skin.

“Mary, are you here?” I whispered. “Is it okay that I’ve come?”

Costas appeared at the door a few minutes later. “I’m starving,” he said, smiling. “Let’s eat.” We walked to a restaurant we’d passed before, and the smell of frying fish wafted past our faces. When we swung through the screen door a moment later, our hearts were light. A redhaired waitress handed us menus. We ordered fish and wine. Fish crackled on the stoves in the kitchen, and we could hear them even from our small table, which sat just under a window looking out onto rain and mud. The waitress brought our wine and we toasted each other, drank it down. Minutes later we were served two platters with thick pieces of fish flesh spread upon them; I took one bite and felt it melt on my tongue.

“This fish is nothing like what they used to pull from the water back home,” Costas said, his face shining with pleasure. “It’s as soft as custard.”

“Yes,” I said. My fork cut through the flesh and pulled it apart in smooth, long pieces. I looked up at him and thought how I could have kissed him, right then.

“I’ve traveled so long,” he said, “to be here.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

He took a long swig of wine, then leaned in. “Like I can finally stop searching. Like this is where I was supposed to be all along.”

Afterward we strolled through the streets, taking it all in. The trees, the mud, the rain that made everything seem hazy. I felt like the child who’d seen Mary walking toward her in front of the courthouse and the adult who’d lost her, at the same time.

“What do you know about your mother, anyway?” I asked, as we headed back down to the river, following a trail of people. “Do you know how she and your father met, anything like that?”

“I just know what my father told me,” he said. “But I never knew if what my father told me was true.”

“What?”

“He said that when he was young, he met a girl named Katerina and thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. They were both working on the boats on the Aegean, I guess, in Turkey.”

“What did she look like?” I immediately imagined Mary with Costas’s eyes, his mischievous look.

“She had long brown hair she’d tie up with silver strings, lashes like Greta Garbo’s, lips that looked like wet fruit. He always got teary describing her. When he met her, he said, she was only nineteen, living with this family who’d found her on the docks and taken her in. She’d steal past the mosquito netting and out the window every night to my father’s little boat he kept docked at the harbor.”

“How romantic,” I said.

When we arrived at the water, there were a few small groups gathered around fires. The people glanced up as Costas and I stretched out along the bank.

“Yes, I guess they spent their nights drifting on my father’s boat out into the sea,” he said. “I know my father tried to impress Katerina with his bravado, diving into the water and coming up with a small octopus wrapped around his hand. The next night he’d serve it up to her, tentacles and all.”