Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [118]
“She came in and wrapped everything in mystery. It was like one of the piñatas the circus kids have on their birthdays. The way the world turns over, is almost too much to bear when all those toys and coins and candies come raining down.”
“Yes,” he said, looking at me. “I know what you mean.”
I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to spread myself bare, everything that was wounded and scarred and ugly. Things with Mauro were so pure and soft, soothing. Mauro healed and protected me, made me forget the past, sink into the present. I worried that I had failed Mauro, that I was failing him now. I thought of Mary then, and suddenly I felt in my blood how utterly I had failed her. I had shut myself away, let myself drift away from her until there was barely anything there. I hadn’t even shared the swing-over trick with her. I had left her alone in that library, to her demons.
“Well,” I said, breathing in. “When she died, I felt like everything she’d given me was gone. As if she had taken it all away from me. I never even thought about why she did it; I just knew that the one person I had, my one friend, had left me. And everything else back then, it was so miserable. All the time. Even talking about it now I just feel blackness.”
“What was wrong?” he asked. “What was so bad?”
My father’s face loomed down, the memory of his callused farmer’s hands flipping me over, rubbing into me, opening me up. Me washing and washing and washing in the river water, when it was through. Closing down until I could barely see the world around me. I thought of Mary. Back then I’d been so dazzled by her; I always should have seen her better than I did.
“My father hurt me,” I said. Tears broke over my face, and tore me up from the inside. “From when I was twelve till the time I left home.”
I could feel the words hanging there before me, as if they could push every molecule of air out of the car. When a long moment of silence had passed, I looked up at him. I could almost imagine I was setting things right, saying now what should have been said before.
“Did she know?” he asked.
I was disoriented, could barely breathe. “Who?”
“Mary. Did she know?”
I was about to shake my head when I remembered her face. You can always leave, she had said, again and again. There are always more selves inside you that just need to come out. She must have known, I thought. She must have felt all that grief and shame; I must have worn it on me like a banner. I remembered running to her covered in bruises, the day she finally set up the trapeze for me and gave me my first lesson, though she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t ever wanted to face the past, I thought. She had always turned everything into stories.
“Her father, too,” Costas said, interrupting my thoughts.
“What?”
“Her father. Katerina said that their father molested them, too. First her and then Mary. That is what my father told me. He said that Kate-rina was the woman of his dreams but that she was all twisted up and broken inside. Always running from Rain Village and longing for it at the same time, to set things right.”
A strange sense of vertigo swept through me, and I clutched my head, squeezed my eyes shut. For a moment I felt like I was that girl again, sitting in front of the courthouse, wearing my father’s hands like a brand on my skin. I was innocent then, but it must have been there the whole time. That mark.
Suddenly it was impossible to pretend the past was something separate from what I was. Costas brought something with him that cut through the power of the circus, made me suspicious of the way it transformed pain. Made me suspicious of the stories Mary told, of the lights and the spangles and the glitter, the Ferris wheel going round and round. Made me suspicious, I realized then, of Mauro, too.
I couldn’t stop the guilt that came over me then, that horrible sense that I had failed Mauro, and Mary, and everyone. That I could have saved her.
As we made our way