Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [123]
Costas turned to me. “It feels like you’re home, doesn’t it?” he asked suddenly, his face earnest and intent. “Does it feel that way for you?”
“Yes,” I said, watching the water, trying to imagine the feel of the bar in my hands, the feel of the rope wrapped around my wrist. Everything from my former life seemed far away. “Yes, it feels like that,” I said.
I looked out at the water again, saw a few fishermen drifting out in their boats. I didn’t want to look at him, I realized.
The murmur of voices blended with the slapping of the water. The moon cast a silver glow over everything. I thought of the cornfield, the moon, all the ways the world can hide us, and suddenly the night and the rain seemed sinister in a way they hadn’t before.
“What happened to her?” I whispered. “What happened here?”
“Tomorrow,” Costas said, “we’ll find out everything.”
I nodded, trying to shake off the feeling that had come over me. That something was wrong. That we were disturbing the dead.
Back in my room, I moved into a deep, long sleep swirling with dreams so real I could feel the burn of my father’s palm on my skin, see his face leaning down into mine, smell the dirt underneath my back, in the cornfields. I saw my mother’s face right before mine, her skin creased and her eyes damp with tears. I saw Mary lean in so close that I could feel her hair brushing against my shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, as if all were right in the world, when suddenly the air turned black and water came gushing out of her melting face. “What are you doing here?” the voice repeated, no longer recognizable.
In my dreams, it felt like days passed. Days, weeks, years. I was in Mexico, and back in the cornfields, and in the herb garden behind the library. I saw Mauro looking at me from underneath his curved lashes, Luis at the table as Victoria smoothed pomade through his hair. The lemon-grease smell. That perfect confluence of lines and the beams overhead, my hands folding over the bar and coming to rest. The claw-shaped corn. I am going to Rain Village to find what beats in my blood, I thought. To find out what happened to her, what I had failed to see.
I started, blinked my eyes open, all the hairs on my neck prickling against my skin. I sat up straight, convinced I was being watched. But the room was dark, empty. The only sound was the constant, prattling hum of the rain on the window. Suddenly I felt like weeping. Like clawing off my own skin. I was not just burrowing into Mary’s past, I thought. I walked to the window and stared out into the dark night. What if it is just grief, I thought, at the bottom of all of this?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When I woke the next morning, I felt as alone as I’d felt years before, that night by the train tracks, waiting for the Velasquez Circus. The world was completely open now as it was then, yet all I wanted to do was sleep, to slip back into dreams and memory. The rain outside was soothing, soft; the bed was warm. I stretched out and turned to the window, where I could see just the tops of the stores and buildings, a bit of the treetops that shadowed all of them. What was Mauro doing right then? I wondered, and I tried to imagine the tents, the train cars, the wire stretching from one side of the big top to the other. I grasped at the images, but they seemed too far from me to reach.
The dread from the night before was gone, and the world seemed light and inhabitable again, but changed. There was a sadness in me that had always been there, I thought, that the circus had only concealed. I got out of bed, my head pounding from lack of sleep.
Outside, Rain Village was beautiful, like a painting. Pastel and shimmering.
My body felt dull, slow. My muscles ached for the bar, I realized, as if they could remember