Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [103]
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.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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