Rain Village (38 page)

I pushed through the trees, started running through the mud. I looked back, saw Costas smile and start running behind me. I laughed. My body felt good. I let my arms swing out wildly, my legs push and push. My muscles burned and then loosened, spun out. My lungs strong, my muscles warm and relaxed. When I saw the cross by the riverbank, surrounded by flowers, I stopped short. Costas nearly ran into me.

“What is it?” he asked, breathing hard, bending over.

I pointed. “The cross. Where it happened.”

I walked up to it, trembling. The river rushed past, just inches from where I stood. I knelt down. The cross stuck out of dry ground at the base of a tree.

I turned to face the river, the rain falling over it so lightly now that it barely broke the surface. I could almost see her there, with him. She seemed to emerge from the forest with her black hair flying around her face and hanging past her shoulders, her feet bare, her hands full of herbs and plants.

I reached down, ran my palms over the mud, the stems of the lilies. “She changed everything, you know? She made everything different.”

“I wish I could have known her.”

I thought of Luis, falling falling to the ground.

“It always seems so strange to me,” I said, “how one moment can change everything.”

It had happened right here. Why hadn’t I listened to her? The river looked so beautiful, tranquil now. The rain just skimmed the surface of it. I closed my eyes, breathing in.

It did not take long to find the Finn house. We turned from the river and walked through the wood, and when it appeared to us it was as if I had visited it one hundred times before. Mary had described it to me so vividly. The stone, the front porch, the twisting path leading to the front door. I glanced at Costas, wanting to make sure I wasn’t just imagining it.

“Is this where they were raised?” he asked, breathing in. For the first time he seemed nervous, unsure. “My mother’s home?”

“Yes,” I said. I touched his arm.

We stepped out of the wood and onto the brick path. The house seemed like something out of a fairytale with its sloped roof, black shutters, and bright red door. I could see Mary slamming out of it, running into the wood, her hair flying everywhere. I looked up at the second-story windows and wondered which had been hers. I knew she had sneaked out into the night, climbing out that window and down the rain gutter to meet her lover at the river. I thought of myself running from Riley Farm to Mercy Library, remembered the exhilaration I had felt, that feeling of being unleashed on the world.

We walked up the front steps and knocked. We waited, looking at each other nervously. There was no answer. After a minute I knocked again.

“It looks like someone is home,” Costas said, peering into the small window I was too short to reach. “This isn’t how I pictured it.”

“What do you see?”

Just then the door wheezed open, and a beautiful woman appeared in front of us. Her hair was long and pale, and she had black-lined eyes the same blue as Mary’s, but shaped like large almonds. She was older than I would have thought. I had always pictured her as a little girl, I realized.

“Yes?” she asked. Her eyes fixed on Costas. “Do I know you?”

I frantically tried to remember everything Mary had said about her.

“I am Costas. I am your nephew. Katerina was my mother,” he said. “I’ve come back here to find you.”

Her face had a stunned expression. “You look more like Mary,” she said, finally. Something broke on her face when she said Mary’s name, I noticed, and then slipped past. “Where are you from? What happened to Katerina?”

“She ended up in Turkey and Greece,” he said, “with my father. I never knew her. She died soon after I was born.”

“Ah,” she said. Her eyes didn’t move from his face. “Katerina and Mary looked alike. Mary is my other sister, you know. I took after our mother more, I guess.”

She was silent then, taking him in, looking right through me where I stood in front of him in the doorway.

“You are very beautiful,” she told him, finally, “the way she was.”

I looked up at him, twisting my head behind me, and was surprised to see the expression on his face. He was staring right back at her, fascinated. Something was happening between them, I thought, and suddenly I felt queasy.

“My name is Tessa,” I said, holding out my hand to her. “I knew Mary when I was a girl. She lived in my town in Kansas.”

When she looked to me her eyes were so blue they didn’t seem real. “You knew her?”

I was about to respond when she seemed to catch herself suddenly and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please come in and sit down.”

We followed her through the hallway and into the living room. She was stunning, wearing a bright silk dress even though she was alone, her body slim and slight, but she seemed much less vibrant than Mary.
It’s this place,
I thought. A large fireplace cast a glow over the room. The house smelled of smoke and wood. Outside, the rain pummeled down.

“Please sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the old-fashioned couches. I smiled politely at her, but she just looked back at me. The couch was like a slab of stone.

“Mary was a librarian in my town, when I was young,” I said, as she sat across from us. Her chair fanned out behind her like a peacock’s wings.

“A librarian,” she repeated, as if she were feeling out the word. “She always loved books so much.”

“Yes,” I said. “She taught me to read, and to love words and stories.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at me as if Mary had come to life again for her, just for that second. “How is she? Is she alive?”

“She died,” I said, “some time ago.”

Isabel took in the information, her face blank. She leaned back into the chair. I was surprised at how uncomfortable I felt with her, and with being in the house in general.

“I tried to find her, you know,” she said, after a minute. Her voice was much lower now, sad. “I wrote letters to her, but I never knew where to send them.”

I looked over at Costas, who was staring at her, rapt. He must see himself in her, I thought. His whole past and future. It seemed crazy, suddenly, that he and I had taken the same journey at all.

“Mary told me all about this place, all about growing up here.”

“Then you don’t know anything.” She looked right at me, and I was surprised by the harshness of her look. Then her face softened. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. “I think I have some biscuits, too, if you’d like.”

“We’d love some,” Costas said, before I could answer. I could have slapped him. “Let me help you.” He jumped up chivalrously and helped her to her feet. She led him out of the room, smiling back at him.

I shook my head and looked around. The fireplace crackled, spit. A large family portrait hung above it, I saw then. A mother and father sitting on two formal chairs, with the three daughters standing at the mother’s side. My heart twisted up inside me at the vision of Mary as a child, the same age I’d been when I’d first met her. She was at the side of the painting, resting her hand lightly upon her mother’s shoulder. Much older, Katerina stood behind her. The two looked almost identical except that Katerina’s hair was stick-straight and Mary’s tumbled down her breast in a mass of dark curls. Isabel stood to Mary’s right and looked only slightly younger. She and the mother had the same pale hair, finer features. You could see that Katerina and her father carried the same haughty expression.

I wondered what was in the rest of the house. What Mary’s room had been like. I thought of Riley Farm with its acres of cornfields and grass. The way the cornhusks flared up and curled over themselves like claws. That was all part of me, I thought, the way all of this had stayed inside Mary.

Isabel and Costas came back into the room, laughing together as he balanced three steaming cups in his hands and set them on the coffee table, pushing one toward me. He looked up and winked at me. She seemed much more at ease, which made her even more beautiful in her pale, slender way. I could only imagine how he’d charmed her with a phrase or story, his kiwi eyes.

He was about to sit when he noticed the portrait. “My God,” he said, walking up to it. Isabel glanced at me and then went to stand beside him.

“I don’t know why I keep that up,” she said, “when they are all gone. Yet I feel as though something terrible will happen if I take it down, even after all these years. I haven’t touched anything, really.”

“I understand,” Costas said. “I take photographs. I won’t ever destroy a photograph of someone.”

I stared at them, how beautiful the two looked together. I almost felt the way I had the first time I’d seen Mary walking toward me. Awestruck. Isabel’s pale, moonlit hair hanging down her back, her hips curving under her gauzy dress. Costas’s dark hair folding over his black collar. He was having as much of an effect on her as she was having on him, I saw, and she kept looking up at him, her face warm and open. I felt smaller than I had in years. It was strange how it could still come up on me, that feeling of being a freak. I sank back into the couch.

Costas asked Isabel about her father and mother, about what his mother, Katerina, had been like when she was young. I tried to focus, but it was all so much. My mind went back and back to those moments on the river, with Mary and William together by the water, what might have happened just before it had taken him from her. I tried to remember everything she’d ever said about it, but all I could think of was her face that day she’d told me she couldn’t leave Oakley.
I am marked by fate,
she had said,
for what I have done.

“What did you do?” I whispered. It all came down to that, I realized. I was so close to her, it. I didn’t need to know anything more.

Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets now, smearing the windows. I could see the forest through a strange watery haze. What would it have been like for her, growing up in this house, sneaking out at night to meet someone like William? I felt a shadow come over me and almost
jumped, but it was only the light shifting. Costas and Isabel were deep in conversation.

I stood up. “Do you mind if I look around?” I asked, interrupting them.

Isabel turned to me. She seemed taken aback.

“If you don’t mind,” I added quickly. “It’s just that Mary described this house to me so many times.”

She relaxed. I realized she was a woman always slightly on edge with people, whereas Mary had been so sure of herself all the time. “Of course,” she said. “Go ahead. Look in her room if you’d like. It’s at the end of the hall. We never touched it, you know. We always thought she might come back. At least, my parents did. But I always knew she was gone for good.”

I stood and watched her for a second. I wanted to ask more, but she had already turned back to Costas. I watched her lean her body into his. I couldn’t deny the stab of jealousy moving through me and berated myself for it.
This is not about him,
I thought. I slipped up the winding staircase, ignoring the dust that rose up around me as I moved over the carpet, trying not to feel self-conscious. They weren’t paying any attention to me, anyway.

As I moved through the upper hallway, which was covered in flowered wallpaper and cloudy mirrors that hung in a row, I looked into each room: the ornate canopies, shelves lined with dolls, the busy wallpaper. Dust seemed to coat everything. There was something not quite right about any of it, about Isabel living in a house that felt crumbling, barren, frozen in time. I passed what had to have been Katerina’s room, the parents’ room. At the end of the hallway, I recognized Mary’s room right away. The piles of books, everywhere. The ornate red quilt covering the bed. I felt my whole body clench.

I stepped into the room tentatively, as if I expected her to pop out
at me, a specter telling me to stop disturbing the dead. But it was empty. It
felt
empty, like a room in a museum. I spent several long minutes touching every object, trying to imagine what each thing might have meant to her. I picked up a small jewelry box with a ballerina on top, opened it and saw a girl’s silver bracelet, a little bird pin with carved feathers, a gold ring. Was there something of her left in any of this? I thought of my old room in Oakley for the first time in years. Geraldine snoring on the other side of the room, the window that looked out over the fields. There was nothing of me in that room, I thought. I had only passed through it, as if I hadn’t been there at all.

I could hear the rain funneling through the gutter, making a hollow whooshing noise. I walked to the window and tried to lift it. It took a moment to get it to budge. I closed my eyes, imagining her before her life was marked by tragedy and regret, when everything was open to her. The window slid open, flinging dust everywhere, and the scent of rain burst into the room. Or had she just been anxious, I wondered, waiting for her one chance to escape, find something new?

The room felt hushed, strange. Rain slammed onto my hands, which rested on the windowsill. I closed my eyes, trying to will myself back home to that day by the river, her voice in my ear and the grass blades rubbing against my back. Twisting her curls around my fingers as she spoke. I wished more than anything that I could go back in time.
What were you trying to tell me?
I would ask.
What was happening to you?
I could remember the way the weeping willows looked hanging over the river, the way the grass had that warm summer smell to it.

You cannot escape your fate, Tessa, or where you come from,
she had said.

My mind strained against it. Maybe there is no secret, I thought then. Nothing to find. Maybe her lover died and she could not find happiness in the world after. Couldn’t it be as simple as that? Whatever happened, could it really matter now?

My head hurt. Mary, and then my father, and then Mauro—it was all crowding my vision, swooping through me like the wind that had brought Costas to the circus and led me here. The pain of loss and memory passed into my gut. I thought of my father and a rage came up from deep inside me.
You took me away from her,
I thought.