Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [110]
Mauro picked up the photo and looked from me to Costas. “This is where you grew up?” he asked.
“I went there,” Costas said. “Trying to find Mary.”
“Yes,” I said to Mauro, and then looked to Costas. I felt unmasked suddenly, after so many years, as if they could look into the photograph and hear the kids calling me freak, see my father hunkered over me. “I used to eat lunches with Mary in that park, every once in a while. I passed through it every day. I practiced hanging from the branches of that tree, the one on the right.”
Mauro laughed, but as he studied the photo and Lollie leaned in to look over his shoulder, part of me wanted to yank it from his hands and rip it to pieces. Mauro was so separate from all of that, I thought; everything in the circus was. My head spun. Before I could really process what was happening, Costas sifted through the photos and pulled out a second one, pushed it toward me. “This is what used to be the library,” he said.
I looked down, and the words “Grady’s Grocery” stared out at me, printed on that same creaking sign out front that used to say “Mercy Library.” The front door, the steps—all of it was the same as I remembered, except for the men and women walking out with brown paper bags full of food. I wondered what had happened to the thousands of books and papers Mary had kept track of so carefully. I thought of her room and her boxes downstairs, the leotards and the trapeze, all the trinkets scattered over her front desk, and I felt such a tremendous sense of loss that I almost couldn’t stand it. She had deserved better, I thought.
“Yes,” I said weakly. “The sign is changed, but other than that it’s the same.”
“How long did you work there?” he asked, as Mauro leaned down and picked up the photo. I looked away. I didn’t want to study the photo. I could imagine my mother, maybe at that exact moment, walking out of the store with a bag full of beef for a stew or roast. I could see Mary returning to the library with her basket filled with papers and herbs, asking what had happened to her books, her overflowing file cabinets. My head was pounding. I felt as if my heart had just been ripped open. It all still matters, I thought. Underneath everything, there was always this.
“Four years,” I said.
“I missed you both by a while.” Costas smiled.
“Yes,” I said, sitting back, letting my breath go from ragged to almost normal. “You did.” Mauro handed the photos back to him, and Costas slid them into their packets and back into his bag. I watched, helplessly. He looked straight at me and I could feel Mauro’s hand grip my knee, but I could not look away. His face so like Mary’s but his own, too. The set of the jaw. The determined air underneath the gypsy clothes.
It was Lollie who broke the tension. “Where do you come from, Costas?”
Everyone waited expectantly for Costas to tell us about Rain Village and Mary and the rest of his life before, the way most travelers sat back and found relief in the telling of their tales.
“I come from Turkey,” he said. “I’m going to Rain Village to find my family’s past, my mother’s past.”
“Your own,” I said.
He looked at me in a way that made me blush, and I looked away quickly, flustered.
“But please,” he said, turning to Lollie, “tell me about Mary, when she was here. I want to hear everything about the circus,” he said, glancing over at me, “and Oakley.”
I looked down at my plate, determined to stop blushing. Lollie didn’t seem to notice. Speaking in her animated way, she told the story of Mary coming to the circus, back when she had followed Juan Galindo like a dog after he’d come upon her in the barn, covered in ice. She moved her arms through the air and slapped her thigh for emphasis. It was a story we’d all heard a thousand times and could listen to one thousand times more.
“I wish I could have known her,” Costas said afterward. “I wish I could have seen her