Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [108]
“Here she is now,” someone said then, pointing to me.
Before I had time to think, the stranger reached his enormous hand out to me and said, “My name is Costas.”
I just blinked at him, a world taking shape in my mind.
“I have come from Turkey,” he said. “I am looking for information about Marionetta the flyer.” If Mauro hadn’t been just behind me, his hand resting protectively on my back, I think I might have tipped over and fallen to the floor.
“It’s okay,” Mauro whispered, but he could not help me. I tried to stop my hands from shaking. A grief welled up in me, so strong I thought I might be dying. My loss overpowered me; the ache came from my blood and my bones.
It was the boy from Mary’s story. It had to be.
I looked at his face, and everything Mary had said came rushing back to me. It was crazy, how it could all return in an instant, no matter how much time had gone by, no matter how far away I was from all of it. Within one moment everything that had happened between then and now had been stripped away, and I was still that girl lying on the floor of Mercy Library, dreaming of a boy with eyes like kiwis, hidden away from the beauty of the world the way I had been.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I understand that you knew Marionetta. She was my mother’s sister, my aunt. I am on my way to Rain Village.”
I stared at him. It was as if Mary had stepped straight out of the past and found me in front of the courthouse once more. Even as we stood there I could see Costas walking with his father in the sun, see the flicker of fish out of the corner of my eye. I could hear Mary’s voice in my ear, talking about her sisters, their stone house, and the forest surrounding it. I could see her behind her desk in Mercy Library, weaving a tale about a boy who grew up in the middle of nowhere.
I felt Lollie’s hand clasp mine as she moved beside me. “Mary spoke of you,” I said then, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “She told me a story about you, about a boy whose father raised him without love, but I never imagined you were someone real, someone I would meet one day.”
“Who are you?” he breathed, looking into me. A strange, delighted smile spread slowly across his face then, and his eyes lit with recognition. “You are the girl from the library,” he said, “aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
Everyone was quiet, watching us. More and more people filled the tent. Once the news began spreading that a stranger had shown up with the name Marionetta on his lips, not one soul stayed out on the lot.
He stepped forward. The camera dangled from his neck. “I had hoped to find my mother’s family,” he said. “She was dead, and I started searching for her sisters. I have traveled so long, searching for my family. For any link. I traced Mary to Oakley, and I went there to find her. I heard she had died some years ago, and then I heard about you and how you’d joined the circus.”
As he spoke, I thought he was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, and then I realized: he looked just like Mary. I thought of him in Oakley, speaking Mary’s name and then mine. Walking through the town square, under the oak tree, past the post office and stationer’s. A longing moved through me, but I wasn’t sure what it was he was stirring.
“I am searching, too,” I said, and it was only in that moment that I realized it was true. “Everywhere.”
“Yes,” he said, looking at me. “Have you been to Rain Village?”
Silence drifted over the tent like a billowing sheet. I could hear Mauro breathing behind me then. Not one of us hadn’t dreamt of the rain and the river, heard the slap of fish on boat decks or the rapping sounds of rain pounding into mud.
“No,” I said, my heart pounding. “Do you know where it is?”
Even Lollie had admitted that she did not know whether Rain Village really existed, despite all she had heard of it from Mary and all she’d seen in visions, years before.
“Yes,” he said—just like that, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. “My mother