Rain Village (8 page)

I nodded but was awash with disappointment.

“How long were you in the circus?” I asked suddenly, as we made our way back to the little kitchen.

Mary turned to me. “About five seasons, I guess,” she said. She set a pot of water to boil and reached up for the herbs.

“Were you famous?” I asked, and then, before she could answer, “Why did you leave?”

The air filled with the smell of herbs and spices. We heard the front door open and voices fill the room. “Can you help those people?” Mary asked, handing me my cup and avoiding my eyes. She seemed relieved, anxious to get rid of me.

I tried not to look too disappointed. The rest of the afternoon went by quickly, and I didn’t have a chance to go back downstairs before Mary and I closed the library. She was in a hurry to get cleaned up and go into town, and kissed me on the cheek before disappearing down the stairs to her room.

Damnit,
I thought, pausing outside on the front steps, every cell of my body pulling me to that box downstairs. Calling out to me, like a secret. Reluctantly, I started the walk home. I watched the snow gleam in the moonlight and thought of Mary on the trapeze. There was a
whole world
buried in that box, I thought. A world brighter and more wonderful than anything I could find in Oakley.

As I cut through the town square and the giant oak trees that shaded it, I spotted a branch extending straight from one side, about six feet from the ground. No one was around aside from a few men entering the tavern on the square.

I dropped my bag and leapt up, wrapping my palms around the branch. It was easy, just like hanging from the bar on the window back home. But here I was unrestricted: I swung back and forth, then pushed up and hung from my knees. The bark scraped my skin, but I didn’t care. I was a thousand miles away from Oakley, anyway.

The next day I scrambled down into the basement before Mary could stop me. She was busy hauling in water from the pump outside, and gathering herbs from her garden to set to drying.

“I need an old newspaper for Mrs. Olsen,” I said. I ran down, past the file room and through the hall, past Mary’s room with the mattress on the floor and line of skirts hanging from a ceiling pipe. When I came to the box I pushed past the leotards and caps, and dug in to see what other treasures it held.

I pulled up a pile of circus programs. I grabbed the whole stack of them, spread them across the floor. It was crazy, even liberating and wild, to see photographs of things I had only heard about from Mary. I’d never quite believed her stories were real, and yet there they were: beautiful boys crossing the high wire; a woman hanging from a thin rope by her hair; and then Mary herself in midflight, soaring from the catcher’s hands back to the bar.

She was so different in the pictures, different than any way I’d ever seen her. Her hair was pulled away from her face and tucked under a red beaded cap, and her skin practically glowed under the light. Even from that far you could see the tilted shape of her eyes, the soft, fluid lines of her arms and legs as they propelled her through the air. She was a bright, magnetic spot suspended amidst the ropes and hooks and metal rings.

It was rapturous: every single picture spoke of some new wonder, some new way of moving through space. I could barely breathe. With my whole being I wanted that, what I saw in the pictures. Flight.

I closed the programs and stacked them beside me, and then, pushing past more tissue paper and wrappings, I came upon a metal bar covered over in parts with tape, a line of rope extending from either end. A thick braided rope curled like a snake at the bottom of the box. Various chains and hooks and smaller ropes were scattered among the coils.

A trapeze, I realized, and rigging, and a web. I wrapped my fingers around the metal, and I swear they
tingled
with the magic of what that bar could do, where it could take me.

And then I no longer cared about getting into trouble, what Mary would say when she saw I’d been snooping. I grabbed that bar and ran up to meet her as quickly as my legs could carry me.

I burst into the room. It was one of those bright mornings when the sun slanted across the floor and all the books turned warm on the shelves. Mary stood at the front desk, next to a pile of books.

“Mary,” I began, breathlessly, “I want you to teach me the trapeze.”

Her eyes fell on the bar in my hands, and a strange look crossed her face, one I couldn’t place. “Where did you find that?”

“Downstairs, among the boxes.”

“You’ve been sneaking around?” she asked, her eyes flashing up at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pleading. “I just came across it. I had to look. I saw the costumes, the programs, you flying—it was all beautiful, Mary, the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

“Those things are sealed away for a reason,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help it. Please teach me.
Please.
” I stopped when I saw how angry she was.

“Tessa,” she said slowly, “I haven’t flown on the trapeze for years now. It’s ancient history. Put that back, and don’t let me see it again.”

I was close to sobbing. “But Mary, I can feel it in my bones. I
have
to do this.”

She looked at me, her face reddening, and then stalked away. I knew better than to follow her.

For the rest of the day we worked in silence. When the evening came, I stormed from the library, slamming the door behind me as hard as I could.
I don’t need her,
I thought, kicking the side of the stairwell, slamming the dangling Mercy Library sign as I ran past. I ran until I reached the town square and the cluster of giant oak trees. I threw off my coat, furiously, and leapt up to one of the branches, started to swing.

As I swung, letting the air soothe me, the cold rip past my tears and anger, I heard laughter. I stopped, turned my head to see a group of kids clustered under another tree, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle between them.

“Tessa!” they taunted. “Tessa the witch!”

I dropped to the ground. My feet crunched into the snow. I was so angry I felt my body dissolve, until I was one voice screaming through the dark. “I hope all of you die!” I cried.

Before I turned and ran home, I swear they all looked genuinely frightened. I flew through the night in a blaze of rage and heartbreak, then collapsed in the cornfield behind my house, hidden away from the world. I huddled against a stalk, grabbed the root, and bent my whole body around it. Tears of frustration ran down my face.

Finally, maybe hours later, I sat up and stretched, blinked at the moonlight. I turned and looked up through the corn at my house, the dark windows. Shivering, I pulled out my book,
Sister Carrie,
and read about Carrie for an hour, getting lost in her world of factories and concrete before dragging myself off to sleep.

Things remained tense between Mary and me throughout the next day. My tenacity surprised me, but I discovered a stubbornness in myself that I’d never known I had.

“Please, Mary,” I said again and again, then rushed off in tears or anger when she refused to budge.

“Tessa, I’m telling you,” she said, following me back into the stacks, “I barely remember anything at all.”

I kept my eyes on the shelf in front of me. “You aren’t that old, Mary. You remember. I
know
you do.”

“It’s too dangerous, anyway,” she said.

“Couldn’t you show me just one time?” I asked. My eyes filled with tears, and I turned to her. “Just once?”

“You know, Tessa,” she said, “it’s beautiful to see you so sure of what you want, so passionate about something. But
why
does it have to be the trapeze? I gave all that up. For good.”

“Because I’ll be good at it,” I said, surprising myself.

She stared at me as I purposefully arranged a pile of books. “I don’t think I can do it,” she said, finally. I looked up at her and was surprised by the expression on her face, a look of something like wistfulness. Her face closed then, like a trap door, and she turned and walked away.

She avoided me for the rest of the day, sending me back into the stacks again and again with books to organize and shelve. I was nearly crazy with frustration, but when the sun went down I walked home slowly, scheming all the while. I walked through the town square and ignored the group of kids sitting under the tree, even when they tried to provoke me. Maybe I could get Mary to hang up the trapeze and learn by myself, I thought. Riley Farm opened up in front of me, but I barely noticed. Maybe there was someone else who could teach me.
Though I knew that such a thing was unheard-of in Oakley, before Mary Finn.

When I stepped into the house, it took me a second to notice my father standing before me, in the dark hallway. I pulled back in surprise. He’d been watching for me, I realized, from the living room window, and all at once I felt like I’d been caught doing something wrong.

His eyes bored into me. I stood immobilized, my heart skipping forward and hammering against my chest. I saw it then, in his hand. A book.
My
book, the one I had carefully hidden under my mattress the night before.

Slowly, I looked back at his face. He was massive in front of me, a mountain. He could have reached out and picked me up between his fingers, I thought, crushed me under his toe. There was nothing more terrifying in all the world than my father standing there with
Sister Carrie
in his hand. He loomed over me, then leaned forward.

I jumped, sure he would hit me. I braced myself for it, my whole body tensing into a wall of muscle and bone. My father lifted his hand, and I shut my eyes. A moment later a loud
thwap!
shook the house. I opened my eyes, saw my book lying on the floor, its pages twisted and crushed.

“Get this trash out of here,” he said. “Get it out
now.
”

He turned and left the room, and I crumpled to the floor, snatched the book up into my hands and under my skirt. How had I let this happen? I knew he would punish me. I could already feel his hands coming down.

I ran from the house and out into the road. Just outside our property I knelt down to bury the book, but then thought better of it. My father’s eyes seemed to follow me, wherever I went, and I could think of only one place to go where things would be okay.

I ran to the herb garden in back of Mercy Library, dug out the silver key Mary hid there, and let myself in. I must have been a sight to
behold: ragged and out of breath, a mashed-up book in my hands. I made my way into the dark space, hoping Mary would still be there.

The whole place was dead quiet. I felt funny and started tiptoeing through. I passed the little kitchen, and the herbs seemed spooky in the dark, roiling around in their glass jars, glittering and smoking as if they were all dreaming in there. I slipped past, through the stacks and into the main part of the library. Mary wasn’t anywhere. It was so dark I could barely see.

I tiptoed to the basement door and cracked it open. “Mary,” I called. There was no answer. I peered down but couldn’t make anything out.

Sighing, I headed to Mary’s desk and sat down, cradling the book in my lap. A power seemed to surge from Mary’s seat and rush through me, up my back and arms, to my face.
It’s okay,
I thought.
Shhh.
But the panic took hold in my gut and wouldn’t leave. Never in my life had I so openly disobeyed my father. I felt tears rush to my eyes and wished Mary were there to comfort me. My father was capable of
anything.
This, I knew to my bones. Could I just stay here? I wondered. It was the first time the thought had truly seized me: maybe I could stay here forever, never go home. Maybe I never needed to see my family again.

And then I heard it: Mary laughing. She must not have heard me before. I swung open the basement door and ran down the steps, toward her room. A faint light shone through the crack beneath her door. How hadn’t I seen it before? I almost forgot everything, my relief was so strong.

I pushed open the door and gasped. Mary was crouching on top of a naked man, her body bare and slick with sweat. Her breasts were full and round, her hair nearly wet, sticking to her neck. The man’s skin was paler than hers. His hands gripped her hips. I didn’t recognize him.

I felt completely shattered. Mary looked up at me, and her mouth dropped open, her hands rushed to her breasts. “Tessa!” she said, and
quickly rolled off the man, to her side. She grabbed for her clothes on the floor next to the mattress. The man sat up and looked at me, annoyed.

“What is this?” he asked.

In its way, it might have been worse than seeing my father looming before me, holding the book in his hand. This was Mary, acting like a
slut.
My mother’s voice echoed in my head:
a tramp,
she’d said,
a black-haired Jezebel.
I had never felt so betrayed, in all my life.

“You’re a slut!” I screamed, my teeth mashing together. “How could you?” My insides were teeming, boiling. I had no idea what would come out of me next, what I would do. “A goddamned whore!”

Tears nipped at my eyes, but I fought them back, translated them into rage and heartbreak.

“Tessa!” Mary cried. “Tessa, stop!” Her face looked crushed with worry. “Tessa, come here!”

She reached for me, but I backed away. “Don’t come near me!” I turned then and ran: up the stairs, through the basement door, the stacks, the back door. I heard her calling out for me, but I trampled straight through the herb garden, into the grass. Past the lumberyard, through the town square, and onto the road that led to home. The air was like fingers swatting my face. The moon was like an assault. I thought of Sister Carrie in her factory, longed for the world to be as flat and dull as that, a place where I would never have to feel anything at all.

I cut through one of the farms near my house and then slowed, slumped in the grass. I felt completely unmoored. I could not go back to the library, and I could not go back home, where I knew my father was waiting with his leather belt. I could
feel
him peering into the dark night, and, irrationally, crouched down in the grass so he wouldn’t see me. I knew that the sooner I got back, the less of a beating I’d get, but the dread seeped into every pore of my body. Where was there to go? Every
minute I was gone made his anger worse, and yet I prayed that with each new second a new possibility would emerge. Could I leave? Go somewhere new? Run off to the circus? Sobs wracked my body, and then finally I went numb, resigned myself to my fate. There was no other place for me but home.