Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [117]
“Are you sure you want to come?”
I nodded. “I need to do this,” I said. There was no question: Rain Village might as well have been my destiny, my pull to it was so strong.
We bought our tickets and boarded a northwest-bound train an hour later. Over the course of the day we watched the land go from dry and dusty to green and lush. I had so many questions, but my head was muddled. I kept imagining Mauro getting ready for the evening show, moving across the wire as if he were walking on air. I couldn’t pin down what I was feeling: heartbroken, yet detached somehow, as if the only thing real was the clanking and rumbling of the train beneath us. I closed my eyes, let the steady clang of the wheels soothe me to sleep.
The next morning Costas’s face was the first thing I saw. It jolted me into the present. I turned to the window; flowers began coating the fields the train passed through, and a light breeze whipped through the train car, fluttering through my hair and clothing. We rode silently. It made no sense, but I knew him. Our longing and sadness formed a bridge between us. In my years with the circus I’d been surrounded by huge, heaping families sprawling across the lot, families who passed their gifts from one generation to the next. Costas knew what it was to feel adrift and alone in the world, no matter what places you found, from time to time, to rest in.
We stayed on the train for two days. We slept sitting up in our seats, our bags propped on the seat next to us. When I woke that second morning and saw his face right there next to mine, I thought for a fierce, crazy moment that I was back in Mercy Library, the sun slanting in through the windows as Mary and I sat by the front desk, stamping people’s books and drinking herb tea. I felt a deep, sudden sense of being past pain. As I focused in on Costas’s face, his beauty, his eyes, there was sadness and guilt and love and desire all at once. It was intoxicating, strange. The past raging back to life. What am I doing? I thought, again and again. But Rain Village lived inside me, moving me toward itself like some undertow pulling me out to sea.
I sat back and stared at the changing landscape, the giant trees and the distant sparkling snow, and thought how everything before this moment seemed like something I’d dreamt. I thought of Mary, how she had left the circus, too, for reasons I’d never understood. Did she feel this same way, anchorless and suspended? Did everyone feel it who left one place for another? I thought of the glitter-covered girl on the trapeze, dangling from a rope, spinning like a windmill in the air while the audience counted each turn and waited for her to fall. I thought of my father carving our hedges into the shapes of animals while Geraldine and I watched from the porch. I thought of being hunched over a sewing machine in Kansas City, and the only thing that seemed real was the glass pane in front of me, the faint smudge blocking my view of the passing towns. I pressed my hand against the glass and stared at the starfish-shaped imprint it left.
“What was she like?” Costas asked, late that night. I blinked my eyes open and turned to him, saw the pale green of his eyes in the dark. “You call her name in your sleep; did you know that?”
“No,” I whispered. I wondered if I always had, if Mauro had simply never told me. Costas smiled encouragingly. “Describe her,” he said.
I looked at him for a moment and then thought back on all those moments, every single moment I had spent with her. With Costas there next to me, I felt safe. I thought of her rasping voice, her laughter as she swung through the air above me or steadied me with her strong, ring-covered hands.
“She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” I said. “Around her everything was different. Everything.”
He smiled and closed his eyes. I was grateful that I could talk to him about Mary without my heart splitting in two. With Costas my life seemed so rich, so bound up in myth. Mauro had Mexico and his raging history, this wonderful larger-than-life family he had