Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [114]
“It must have been very hard for you when she died,” he said softly, leaning toward me.
“Yes,” I said, conscious of his skin, his smell. He could touch places in me that Mauro couldn’t, I realized. “It was.”
“It must have been hard to see that she could not save herself, when she had done so much to save you.”
“I never understood,” I said. “She showed me that there was the circus, and then she wouldn’t leave with me. I asked her, you know. To leave with me.”
“What did she say?”
I felt I was half there with Costas, half back in Oakley with her. Sitting by the river eating strawberries, listening to her describe her fate. “She said she couldn’t leave. That sometimes the world closed down until there was no room left. She wanted me to go without her.”
“That is a terrible story.”
“She was done with life. I didn’t know that then. I don’t understand it now.”
“Have you never felt that way?” he asked.
I stared at him. “Have you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Many times. I’ve always felt there was a hole at my center, that I had no place, no home.”
“But you have a wife and a son.”
“And you have a husband,” he said. “And the circus. I have never seen anything so extraordinary as you in the air, Tessa. And yet here you are.”
“But I have never felt like I was done with life,” I said then, defensive suddenly, a new feeling moving through me, something strong and ferocious. “Even at the moment when I knew Mary was gone and I felt that I had nothing in the world.”
Suddenly his palm was on my waist and his face moving toward me. His eyes fierce and blazing. I felt my whole body tense, my hands shaking.
“I should go back,” I said, pulling away.
“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”
I nodded, unable to look at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for me, and I ran out into the night, disheveled, my heart racing. I couldn’t see straight. I ran past the big top, stopped in the menagerie, and leaned against the tiger’s cage. Tears rolled down my face. The tiger crept over to the bars. I reached out and touched her fur.
It all hit me then: how I had never really known so many things about Mary, never known what had made her so broken or what had made her step into the river and drown herself that autumn day. How I hadn’t known about the crazy ring that had gleamed from her neck, the one she’d told me about in her story of the peasant girl. How I had never even known what had led her to that library in Oakley to read thick books and turn her back on her own life. I had visions of people following me, hunting me down, she had said. She had given up on life, left me alone to face the future. I sobbed, and the tiger pressed her body against the cage, comforting me. I thought then that what Costas had said was true for me, too: something had been missing in my life, hovering around the edges and flashing in my periphery, a nagging sense of having left something half done. I needed to understand what had happened to her. I needed to understand it so badly that it seemed crazy I hadn’t been to Rain Village already.
Sunlight crept over the lot. It was one of those moments in life that seemed to have always been there, when you know so strongly that something has to occur that it may as well have already happened.
When I got back to the car Mauro was sitting up on the bed waiting for me.
“Where were you?” he asked. His anger was a palpable presence in the room, making its own shadows against the wall.
“I took a walk,” I said. My eyes filled with tears. I was grateful for the window shades blocking out the dim sunlight. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“You saw him.”
“Yes,” I said. “Just to talk. I needed to talk to him.”
“I don’t understand. Why?”
I stood there. “Because of Mary,” I said, my voice breaking. “Don’t you see? Because of everything that happened.” I gestured helplessly.
“Tessita,” he said, softening. “That was so long ago. Why do you keep it so close to your heart?” He came over to me, cupped my face in his palm. “You have to let go of it, all that dolor.”
I leaned in, let him pull me to his chest. I wanted to believe that there