Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [127]
It was coming back to me slowly, the numbers we had arranged the books by, the way we had kept an order to the library even as the library itself was pure chaos, and I made my way to where I knew the poetry would be shelved. I turned down the aisle, felt a calmness fall over me as I saw volume after volume line the shelves, as I’d known they would. The book was right where I knew it would be. I hadn’t even known I was looking for it until I saw its old cracked leather binding, the gilded pages. I turned the pages, and for a moment I was sure she was right next to me, her black hair curling down and tapping my shoulder.
I felt suspended. Thinking of Mary as a girl, bent over this book, and remembering the two of us in Mercy Library, the words of the poem making everything in the world drop away.
She was like me, I thought, and it was less a thought than a feeling of recognition I had never had before. And then: Why didn’t I tell her about my father? That day, by the river eating strawberries. I had come so close. I winced, thinking of it, the two of us sitting by the water, occupying different worlds utterly.
“May I help you?”
I looked up, startled, slamming the book shut as if it contained something forbidden. I had almost forgotten where I was.
“I am just reading a bit,” I said, looking up at the old woman standing over me. I was struck by her pale pale skin and light-blue eyes, the white wispy hair pulled back from her face.
She looked down at the book in my hands. “You like poetry,” she said. A strange expression came over her face, and she knelt down beside me. Her body was surprisingly graceful and agile. “Tennyson,” she said, her voice growing soft.
“Did you ever know a girl named Mary Finn?” I asked. “She was from here and became a librarian in the town where I grew up.”
“Why, yes.” She looked at me carefully, surprised. “Where are you from?”
“Kansas,” I said.
“Ah.” She stared at me for a moment, then smiled and shook her head. “So she ended up in Kansas, did she? And she’s a librarian?”
“She was, yes. A great one.”
She kneeled down next to me. “I shouldn’t be so surprised. She spent a lot of time here. I’d be ready to close up, thinking the library was empty, and then I’d find her off in some corner buried in a book. She would just be lost in it. I’m glad to hear that she went and made a life for herself.”
“Oh, she did,” I said. “She was in the circus, too. She became a trapeze star.”
“The circus,” she repeated. Her face became girlish, soft. I couldn’t help but smile.
“Yes,” I said. “She was called Marionetta. She wore red sequins and people lined up outside her door to give her flowers.”
She nodded, her face wondering. Her eyes moved over my fingers, my hands. I clasped them together. “You are a bit like her,” she said. “How she was. Do you know that?”
“Me?”
“Your expressions and gestures,” she said. She fingered my long skirt, the little ribbons hanging off it. “Your clothes.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling myself blush. “She was like the perfect woman to me, a movie star. I always wanted to be like her.”
“Well, some people just blaze through the world,” she said. “Mary was always like that. I just can’t get over it, though, hearing about her now. We always wondered what happened to her.”
“After the accident, you mean?”
“Yes,” she said. “After William died. Her lover. No one ever really knew what happened, whether it was an accident or not, what she did after. Did she tell you about it?”
I shook my head. “She said that he drowned, and that she left shortly after. I know it broke her heart. I was hoping to find out more by coming here.”
“Ah,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll find what you want here, then. When it happened, this place was crazy. There were all kinds of rumors about what had happened. Some people swore Mary came running out of the woods with a bloody rock in her hand, screaming about murder. Some said William had betrayed her,