Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [119]
“It’s like we’ve entered a fairytale,” he said.
He leaned back and I smiled at him. “I wonder what Rain Village is like,” I said. “She always made it sound so magical.”
The sun caught his eyes and lit them bright green. Suddenly I wondered how different my life would be with someone like him. It seemed astonishing, sometimes, how much the world could change, depending on where you were and who the person was next to you. I imagined what my life would be like if I lived in Turkey and Greece, had hair thick with salt.
For a second I thought Costas would kiss me. His face was so close to mine. His eyes moved down my face, to my lips. The light shifted then, and I saw my face in the window behind him. His eyes went dark again, and I turned away, swallowing. Don’t lose your head, I thought. It would be too easy to think I was someone else.
Hours passed in a strange sort of haze. Costas slept next to me. I looked back out at the landscape, watched it become green, luminous. My thoughts returned to Mary, to what I was trying to find. We were in her world now, I realized. After all this time. As the train crossed the countryside I could practically see the clear air turn to mist, the ground become soaked with water. When we started heading still farther west, the whole world lit like an emerald, and the trees seemed to tap the sky.
I wondered if this was what Mary had seen when she’d left Rain Village, tears streaming down her face and trailing out behind her: these trees, this falling rain, these little towns that seemed equal parts wood and mist.
“Why did your mother leave Rain Village?” I asked Costas in those endless hours as we sat side by side staring at the wet landscape. “Was it because of her father?”
“I only know what my father told me,” he said. “I never knew her at all, you know. But she said her father beat her and hurt her and that no one said a word about it. And that one day she finally left. She wandered all over the world, he said, before she and my father fell in love.”
“What happened to her?”
“One day right after I was born, she walked into the ocean and kept on walking.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, breathing in. “That’s terrible. She drowned? Like Mary did? Like William, too?”
“I guess,” he said. “William?”
“The one Mary was in love with. The reason she left.”
He looked confused. “I don’t know about William,” he said. “What happened?”
“I just know that he drowned. That Mary was in love with him and he drowned, and she left soon after, went out into the world. I don’t think she ever went back.”
“It is a hard thing,” he said, “to leave the place you come from.”
I thought of Oakley, the tree in the town square, the hedges that lined our yard. For a second I wondered if he was making fun of me. I looked up quickly, but he seemed to be somewhere else completely.
“You must have a lot of guilt,” he said. “To drown yourself after that. You know?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess so.” I was embarrassed to have never thought of it and looked down, tapped my foot on the seat in front of me.
Of course Mary had felt guilty. Every time I thought of her, she seemed to take on a new shape, a new dimension. I wondered if it was ever really possible to know someone else.
Day moved into night, and rain pounded against the train-car windows, hammering and beating down, never letting up for a minute. By the time we arrived at the tip of the country, it seemed like we would never see the sun again. The rain pounded down and the sky was like a sheet of rock as we boarded a small bus that would take us to the riverboat, the one Mary had described, and at long last into Rain Village. Time shifted and took on