Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [104]
Slashes of pain went through me as I let her words sink in. “What about Dad?” I asked, after several moments.
“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what he thought or felt. He was always going off by himself, you remember, and then at a certain point he stopped talking at all.”
She looked at me.
“Why did you leave us?” she asked after a long pause, her face twisting slightly.
We sat in silence for several minutes then. I didn’t know what to say, just stared at her tapered shoes. “Was it Dad?” she whispered.
I looked up at her, searching her face. “It was everything,” I said finally. “I couldn’t stay there.”
“It’s okay, Tessa,” Geraldine said, and reached out for my hand. “I know you were sad at home. I knew things weren’t right, somehow, for you. I always hoped you were okay after you left. I would try to imagine where you were.”
I was surprised to see her crying, and even more surprised to feel the tears sliding down my own cheeks.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“You’re my only sister,” she said. “I wondered if you thought about us, knew what happened to us the way we knew about you, all this time. I mean, we saw you in the papers. We saw pictures of you on the trapeze. We saw pictures of you when you were married.”
My whole world seemed to shift over one notch more with each thing she said. “I never thought you could see me when I couldn’t see you,” I whispered. “It was always the opposite, when I was growing up.”
“I felt that way, too,” Geraldine said, “when we were growing up. I felt invisible, though I was hideous and gigantic, and I could never hold myself in the way I wanted to.”
“Really?” I said.
She nodded, smiling at me.
“I’d see that woman Mary sometimes when Mom took me to town, and even though Mom yanked me away and got furious at me, I’d stare at Mary and imagine spending time with her like you did. I was always jealous of you back then. I was so lumbering and slow, and you could run for miles.”
“You remember her?” I asked quietly. “Really?”
“Of course,” she said. “I remember the first time I heard of her. Mom was yelling at Dad and saying he couldn’t bring books into the house. She always thought they’d had an affair. God, she talked about it enough.”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering that long-ago day. “I remember.”
“She got so mad sometimes thinking about you working there, but she wouldn’t dare say anything. I mean, with the money, and Dad.”
“Did he ever say anything?”
“No,” she said. “He never did.”
She looked to the ground for a second, and suddenly I just knew. “Geraldine,” I asked slowly, “did Dad take you out in the fields, too?”
The room was silent for several long moments. Her shoulders crumpled, and she bent her head down.
“I never knew,” I whispered. “I thought it was only me.”
“I don’t know what was wrong with him, Tessa,” she said, looking up. “Why he was like that. Mom was always worried about Mary Finn and every other beautiful woman, but it was us. Just us.”
“But why?” I asked, knowing, of course, that Geraldine didn’t have the answers any more than I did. And yet it was the first time I was able to just ask that question, in all its purity: Why?
She shook her head. “Look at you now, though,” she said, smiling shyly. “Going all over the place, a circus star! When I first saw you in the paper, I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to jump up and down.”
Her smile was genuine, spreading across her face. I smiled back at her. I couldn’t place my feelings exactly, and didn’t try. I thought how the world works in messy, imprecise ways, smashing itself together when you want to keep it apart, breaking into a thousand slivers when all you want is peace.
We stretched out on the bed and sat with our backs against the headboard. Geraldine told me of her life and job, the farm, and some neighbors I only vaguely remembered. She told me that Mercy Library had been turned into a supermarket that my brothers sold crops to, and all the books had been donated to a new school the town had built a couple years back.
The day slipped into dusk. At one point, late