Rain Village (36 page)

“What happened?”

“They finally ran away together, to Greece. The town was an hour from Greece by boat, so they just kept going one night, to an island called Kos, and they moved into a small house with a white tile floor. They spent their days planting flowers and hanging curtains and swimming in the ocean and eating vats of yogurt piled high with fruit. That’s how he used to describe it to me.”

“It must have been hard for him to talk about it to you after everything that happened,” I said. I thought of the riverboat, imagined Katerina going halfway across the world just to fall in love with a man on the water.

“It was the best time of his life. He always talked about it. It’s one of the reasons I realized I had to make this journey, so I wouldn’t be filled with regret the way my father was. I felt like I would never be myself until I came here.”

“When did things go bad with Katerina?”

“Well,” he said, “the way my father tells it, she used to talk about this place, dream about it, mumble about it in her sleep. Always talked about coming back, and one day she just snapped and walked into the water.”

I couldn’t help but feel shivery, imagining it. “That’s terrible,” I said. I wondered if Mary had wanted to return here, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “I get the feeling there is a lot of sadness here, because of the place. I don’t know why I feel that way; right now I’m so at peace. Are you?”

I looked at him, not sure how to answer. “Yes,” I said, finally. I
was
at peace, but I was everything else, too. Happy. Filled with remorse. Detached from everything, as if I were reading it all in a book.

We stared out into the water, the tangle of trees and foliage hanging over it, the people scattered across the bank. I could not get over the feeling that we were at the edge of the world, and that we could do anything. My heart reached for Mauro, but it almost didn’t feel real, as if he were a character I was remembering from a story. It was a dangerous moment, a moment when a person could forget everything that had come before, and disappear. After a while the sound of the rain and the weight of memory took their toll. Barely able to keep our eyes open, we watched night descend over everything—slowly, like a parachute falling to the ground.

Costas turned to me. “It feels like you’re home, doesn’t it?” he asked suddenly, his face earnest and intent. “Does it feel that way for you?”

“Yes,” I said, watching the water, trying to imagine the feel of the bar in my hands, the feel of the rope wrapped around my wrist. Everything from my former life seemed far away. “Yes, it feels like that,” I said.

I looked out at the water again, saw a few fishermen drifting out in their boats. I didn’t want to look at him, I realized.

The murmur of voices blended with the slapping of the water. The moon cast a silver glow over everything. I thought of the cornfield, the moon, all the ways the world can hide us, and suddenly the night and the rain seemed sinister in a way they hadn’t before.

“What happened to her?” I whispered. “What happened here?”

“Tomorrow,” Costas said, “we’ll find out everything.”

I nodded, trying to shake off the feeling that had come over me. That something was wrong. That we were disturbing the dead.

Back in my room, I moved into a deep, long sleep swirling with dreams so real I could feel the burn of my father’s palm on my skin, see his face leaning down into mine, smell the dirt underneath my back, in the cornfields. I saw my mother’s face right before mine, her skin creased and her eyes damp with tears. I saw Mary lean in so close that I could feel her hair brushing against my shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, as if all were right in the world, when suddenly the air turned black and water came gushing out of her melting face. “What are you doing here?” the voice repeated, no longer recognizable.

In my dreams, it felt like days passed. Days, weeks, years. I was in Mexico, and back in the cornfields, and in the herb garden behind the library. I saw Mauro looking at me from underneath his curved lashes, Luis at the table as Victoria smoothed pomade through his hair. The lemon-grease smell. That perfect confluence of lines and the beams overhead,
my hands folding over the bar and coming to rest. The claw-shaped corn.
I am going to Rain Village to find what beats in my blood,
I thought.
To find out what happened to her, what I had failed to see.

I started, blinked my eyes open, all the hairs on my neck prickling against my skin. I sat up straight, convinced I was being watched. But the room was dark, empty. The only sound was the constant, prattling hum of the rain on the window. Suddenly I felt like weeping. Like clawing off my own skin. I was not just burrowing into Mary’s past, I thought. I walked to the window and stared out into the dark night. What if it is just grief, I thought, at the bottom of all of this?

When I woke the next morning, I felt as alone as I’d felt years before, that night by the train tracks, waiting for the Velasquez Circus. The world was completely open now as it was then, yet all I wanted to do was sleep, to slip back into dreams and memory. The rain outside was soothing, soft; the bed was warm. I stretched out and turned to the window, where I could see just the tops of the stores and buildings, a bit of the treetops that shadowed all of them. What was Mauro doing right then? I wondered, and I tried to imagine the tents, the train cars, the wire stretching from one side of the big top to the other. I grasped at the images, but they seemed too far from me to reach.

The dread from the night before was gone, and the world seemed light and inhabitable again, but changed. There was a sadness in me that had always been there, I thought, that the circus had only concealed. I got out of bed, my head pounding from lack of sleep.

Outside, Rain Village was beautiful, like a painting. Pastel and shimmering.

My body felt dull, slow. My muscles ached for the bar, I realized, as if they could remember what my mind and heart couldn’t. I must get back soon, I thought. A ferocious longing moved through me then, searing through the rain and mist and memory. But even if it was crazy to
have come here, it was time to put my dreams to rest, I realized, and find out what had happened to Mary, after all this time.

I took a shower and threw on my clothes, ignoring my headache. A minute later I was banging on Costas’s door. He appeared, his face sagging with sleep.

“What is it?” he asked. “Tessa, are you okay?” He reached down and touched my cheek with his fingertips.

“I’m fine,” I said, stepping back. “I just want to get started. I need to know what happened here, why her presence is so strong, why it’s all so sad. Do you want to come with me or not?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “But what’s your rush? We’re here now. We have all the time in the world.”

I looked at him in surprise. “I don’t have all the time in the world,” I said. “I have a life to get back to. We need to find out what happened here, Costas. That’s why we came. Why I came.”

“Yes,” he said, dreamily, watching me, and it occurred to me then that he planned to stay in Rain Village, that he would never return to his wife and son.

“This isn’t home,” I said, carefully. Lollie’s words echoed in me:
Don’t mistake her past for your own future.

He nodded but didn’t seem to be listening. His eyes bored into me, made me feel strange and exposed. “Just give me a few minutes to get ready.”

I went to wait for him in the lobby. I was so anxious to get started I could barely stand still, and kept shifting from one foot to the other, clenching my fists and teeth. The wall was covered in old photographs. I walked up, studying them, all the sepia-toned faces staring back at me. One photo caught my eye: a young girl holding a dog, a black ribbon hanging down her hair, which was swept to the side. There was a haunting, lost quality to the image that was unsettling.

“Good morning,” I heard.

I turned to the man behind the desk. I hadn’t seen him when I’d walked in. I noticed a book lying on the desk beside him. Shakespeare. “Good morning,” I said.

“Light rain today,” he said, gesturing to the window. I looked out and was struck by the gentle sunlight, the rain like mist.

“It’s lovely,” I said, then pointed to the photo. “Who is this girl?”

“Her name was Lena.”

“Was?”

“She died a few years after that was taken. A fire. That must have been forty years ago.”

“How terrible.” I stared at the girl’s face, thought what an odd thing, to have been captured during this one moment in her life, sitting with a dog on her lap and a bow in her hair. I thought of Mary in the brochures, forever caught in that moment of flight. “Do you know of a girl named Isabel Finn, by chance? She had two sisters, Mary and Katerina.”

“Sure,” he said. “Isabel lives in a house in the woods. We don’t see her around much in town, but she’s out there.”

“Do you know how we can find her?”

He looked at me curiously. “Now, what could you two want with Isabel?”

“Oh,” I said. “My friend who came here with me. She’s his aunt. He’s come here to find her. And I knew her sister Mary, a long time ago.”

“You knew Mary?” he asked. I noticed then that his whole face shifted, grew light. “Mary Finn?”

“Yes,” I said. “She was the librarian in my town, when I was growing up. A little town in Kansas.”

“Kansas,” he repeated slowly. “Is that right?”

“You knew her?” I looked at him more carefully, realized he was probably her age. The age she’d be now.

“We lived not too far from the Finns when I was a boy,” he said. “I had the biggest crush on Mary for years and years.”

“You did?” I asked. I felt a strange uneasiness move through me, a sense of no longer knowing where I was. I tried to shake it off.

“Do you find that hard to believe?” he asked, laughing. “We all had crushes on her, but she only had eyes for William Jameson. We were all sorry when she disappeared.” He looked at me, studying me. “Most of us just thought she up and died after William did. You say you knew her?”

“Yes,” I said, hesitating. “She joined the circus after she left here. Became a trapeze star. She traveled all over the world.”

“Isn’t that something?” he said. He shook his head. “I bet she was a sight.”

“Yes,” I said. “No one ever forgot her.”

“Well,” he said, nodding, “we’ve never seen another like her.”

“What about Isabel?” I asked. “Isn’t she like her?”

“Isabel,” he said, drawing out the word. “No, she’s not really like Mary. Never was. She’s a bit more . . . quiet, I guess.”

“Where did you say I could find her?”

He smiled, hesitated. “She lives in the forest,” he said. “Close to the river. If you follow the river west enough, you’ll come to a little cross. Where they found William. The Finns lived just north of it.”

I shivered slightly and nodded. The spot of that ancient tragedy. Just then the door opened and Costas walked in, freshly showered and holding his camera. His hair was still wet, combed back from his face.

“Ready to eat?”

“Okay,” I said, looking up at him. It struck me, how handsome he was. “Our host was just telling me how to find the Finn house.”

“Great,” he said. He nodded at the man, then put out his arm to me.

Outside, the rain seemed to lick and fizzle at our faces. I caught it on my tongue.

“It’s gorgeous here, isn’t it? I feel so relaxed,” Costas said.

“Yes,” I said, staring out at the hazy street, the fishermen tromping across the muddy road, to the river. Leaves seemed to be dangling over everything, and the trees hovered on top of us, the thick darkness of the forest. “It’s all leaves and water and mud.”

“Where I was raised, it was just flat and hot. Like nothing. It was like being in the middle of blank space. Here I feel embraced by something.”

He was practically glowing, I saw. The rain running down his face didn’t seem to bother him, while I found myself with my palm at my forehead, wincing. The line of shops stretched out in front of us, like a railway track, blurring in the distance. He raised his camera, capturing all of it.

Costas laughed as we arrived at the restaurant. I almost slid on the step, and he steadied me. The rain lashed over the wooden planks as we stepped inside. “Doesn’t it explain so much, just being here?”

We sat down at a table. His eyes were cat’s eyes. “You’re so much like her,” I whispered.

He reached over and put his hands on mine. I jumped slightly, then settled into his touch. So much was going through me, and it was hard to understand: how much was him, how much was her, how much was just what was inside me

We were quiet, taking each other in. The waitress brought us coffee, and I released his hands, took a long sip. The anxiety moving through me didn’t fade. I stared out the window, at the muddy street outside. I focused on a familiar-looking woman and for a moment my heart leapt, until I realized it was the black-haired woman from the riverboat. I looked around the restaurant at all the men and women eating and talking.
Everyone’s eyes seemed to be bright blue or green, the colors of the river and the leaves.

“You knew her, Tessa,” Costas said then. “I never knew my mother or anyone related to her. I would give anything for just a few minutes with her. It was just my father and me, always, in the middle of nowhere.”

Something changed in the way he looked at me. I could feel myself blushing and glanced down, embarrassed. “I’m just afraid that you want too much,” he said.

The waitress set our eggs in front of us, and I looked up, met her eye. She smiled vaguely. I looked over at Costas and then back up at her. She was so pale, with long, black hair. She looked like Mary, and like Costas. You could tell they all came from the same part of the world. I had a strange, sudden sense of being all alone.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m wondering if you remember a girl named Mary Finn.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, squinting at me.

I nodded, tried not to show my disappointment. Costas began eating his eggs.

“She lived here a long time ago. Maybe you’re too young.”