Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [129]
I stared at him, not sure how to answer. I gently touched his arm. “Let’s go find Isabel now,” I said. “You need to meet your family before you start thinking too much.”
He placed his palm under my chin, stared at me intently. I felt a shiver run through me. I was so full of emotions, desires, I overflowed with them. I felt almost as if I had seen Mary, and now I wanted the world to be as stark and raw and real as possible. I wanted to touch Costas’s skin, I realized. Feel him over me and inside me. I moved my face against his palm.
Then I caught myself. A pang of guilt passed through me, and I came to my senses. “Let’s go,” I repeated, lifting his hand away.
Outside, the rain was hammering down. It was afternoon already, I realized with surprise. The whole world seemed washed through with gray and silver, and the woods stretched out in front of us in a tangled mass. Costas walked easily through the thick mud while I kept sinking into it, pulling out my feet with loud sucking noises, feeling the mud fling up and slap against my leg. As we moved into the woods, the whole world seemed to change. The leaves simmered against the dusky afternoon. Flowers sprouted from the ground, spreading out like jumbles of curls.
I pushed my way past a tree branch hanging in our path. The river rushed to our left, the rain pummeling it and making it wild. “The librarian knew Mary when Mary was young,” I said.
He nodded.
The leaves overhead were like a canopy; when they opened up we could see the sky and the splinters of rain. When they closed again the world became dark and hushed, the earth solid beneath us. I prayed Isabel would be home, that we could find her. Just a little bit more, I thought. Right into Mary’s heart, into that memory, us at the riverbank. I wanted to burst it open. How many times had I dreamt of it? Going back in time to tell Mary that I understood her, that I loved her, that I knew what had happened to her and that bad things were happening to me, too. This is exactly who I am, I would have said.
I pushed through the trees, started running through the mud. I looked back, saw Costas smile and start running behind me. I laughed. My body felt good. I let my arms swing out wildly, my legs push and push. My muscles burned and then loosened, spun out. My lungs strong, my muscles warm and relaxed. When I saw the cross by the riverbank, surrounded by flowers, I stopped short. Costas nearly ran into me.
“What is it?” he asked, breathing hard, bending over.
I pointed. “The cross. Where it happened.”
I walked up to it, trembling. The river rushed past, just inches from where I stood. I knelt down. The cross stuck out of dry ground at the base of a tree.
I turned to face the river, the rain falling over it so lightly now that it barely broke the surface. I could almost see her there, with him. She seemed to emerge from the forest with her black hair flying around her face and hanging past her shoulders, her feet bare, her hands full of herbs and plants.
I reached down, ran my palms over the mud, the stems of the lilies. “She changed everything, you know? She made everything different.”
“I wish I could have known her.”
I thought of Luis, falling falling to the ground.
“It always seems so strange to me,” I said, “how one moment can change everything.”
It had happened right here. Why hadn’t I listened to her? The river looked so beautiful, tranquil now. The rain just skimmed the surface of it. I closed my eyes, breathing in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It did not take long to find the Finn house. We turned from the river and walked through the wood, and when it appeared to us it was as if I had visited it one hundred times before. Mary had described it to me so vividly. The stone, the front porch, the twisting path leading to the front door. I glanced at Costas, wanting to make sure I wasn’t just imagining it.
“Is this where