Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [105]
“Mauro,” I said, “this is my sister, Geraldine. Geraldine, meet my husband, Mauro.”
I laughed out loud as her eyes grew wide and she looked him over slowly, from top to bottom. “Wow,” she breathed, flushing all over.
Mauro was no less taken aback. “Tu hermana?” he asked, looking at me and shaking his head. I smiled and shrugged. “Well, then,” he said, putting out his hand to her, “I guess that makes you my sister, too. Come, join us all for dinner. You have to tell us all of Tessa’s secrets, since she has so many.” He looked back at me and winked.
I couldn’t believe how well we all got along that night. Carlos took one look at Geraldine and sat next to her until showtime, enthralling her with stories about Mexico and the Ramirez family’s colorful history. Lollie looked from Geraldine to me and back again, smiling.
“You are both so beautiful,” she kept saying. “Like two petals on the same rose.”
I gave Geraldine a front-row seat for the show that night, and as I twirled inside the hoop and on the rope I felt her eyes watching me, seeing something that she thought might help her on her way. I didn’t know what it was. I thought of my dream, years before, of my family sitting under me, watching me the way the rest of the crowd did.
After the show we drank sangria in front of a huge bonfire. My husband on one side of me and my sister on the other, Paulo and Serena’s babies—three of them by then—running around screaming and naked, Carlos and José laughing and telling Geraldine stories about how scared I had been when I’d first come, how mean Lollie had been, while Lollie and Ana and the twins and everyone else just laughed and talked and drank.
There was so much more I wanted to say to Geraldine that day and couldn’t. I could not tell her how much I had always longed to sit with her the way we were then, as friends, as sisters. I could not tell her how the mention of my father turned my blood to ice, or that just hearing Mary’s name made her more real to me than she had been for years. My Mary and the one Geraldine spoke of were the same—not the woman on the flying trapeze, but the town librarian who drove men mad and set them to dreaming. I could not believe that the world I’d done everything to suppress was still out there, beating with life and love and heartbreak, like every other place.
Before she left Geraldine took me aside, by the fire, and just held on to me. We were both drunk and happy, standing in the hazy light.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For everything. I’m sorry I never came to you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I whispered.
Geraldine’s visit awakened something new in me, something that nagged at me over the next few years and brought back memories I’d thought were gone forever, flashes of the cornfields behind our house, empty and bleak as a nightmare. My family took on a new shape in my mind—no longer frozen in Mary’s world, they had lives that extended parallel to mine, with new loves and careers and regrets and sadnesses. All the souls from my past began inhabiting my life like ghosts. Sometimes my memories were so strong I would barely see Mauro in front of me, touching my face, taking my hands in his own.
Until then the circus had seemed like a separate, magical world existing outside time and space. It had its own force and energy, its own rules as it moved from one town to another. I had always felt a little like if I stepped away from the circus, time would restart: my father would reemerge from the fields, push me back down into the dirt, and block out the moon.
But Geraldine’s visit set something in motion, set my heart to remembering. My perspective started to shift, bit by bit, and memories that surprised and shocked me began to occupy my mind, chipping away at the layers of myth and story the circus had given me.
I began recalling sights and smells and voices, began staring at Mary’s picture and remembering what it had felt like to sit next to her on