Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [131]
I looked over at Costas, who was staring at her, rapt. He must see himself in her, I thought. His whole past and future. It seemed crazy, suddenly, that he and I had taken the same journey at all.
“Mary told me all about this place, all about growing up here.”
“Then you don’t know anything.” She looked right at me, and I was surprised by the harshness of her look. Then her face softened. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. “I think I have some biscuits, too, if you’d like.”
“We’d love some,” Costas said, before I could answer. I could have slapped him. “Let me help you.” He jumped up chivalrously and helped her to her feet. She led him out of the room, smiling back at him.
I shook my head and looked around. The fireplace crackled, spit. A large family portrait hung above it, I saw then. A mother and father sitting on two formal chairs, with the three daughters standing at the mother’s side. My heart twisted up inside me at the vision of Mary as a child, the same age I’d been when I’d first met her. She was at the side of the painting, resting her hand lightly upon her mother’s shoulder. Much older, Katerina stood behind her. The two looked almost identical except that Katerina’s hair was stick-straight and Mary’s tumbled down her breast in a mass of dark curls. Isabel stood to Mary’s right and looked only slightly younger. She and the mother had the same pale hair, finer features. You could see that Katerina and her father carried the same haughty expression.
I wondered what was in the rest of the house. What Mary’s room had been like. I thought of Riley Farm with its acres of cornfields and grass. The way the cornhusks flared up and curled over themselves like claws. That was all part of me, I thought, the way all of this had stayed inside Mary.
Isabel and Costas came back into the room, laughing together as he balanced three steaming cups in his hands and set them on the coffee table, pushing one toward me. He looked up and winked at me. She seemed much more at ease, which made her even more beautiful in her pale, slender way. I could only imagine how he’d charmed her with a phrase or story, his kiwi eyes.
He was about to sit when he noticed the portrait. “My God,” he said, walking up to it. Isabel glanced at me and then went to stand beside him.
“I don’t know why I keep that up,” she said, “when they are all gone. Yet I feel as though something terrible will happen if I take it down, even after all these years. I haven’t touched anything, really.”
“I understand,” Costas said. “I take photographs. I won’t ever destroy a photograph of someone.”
I stared at them, how beautiful the two looked together. I almost felt the way I had the first time I’d seen Mary walking toward me. Awestruck. Isabel’s pale, moonlit hair hanging down her back, her hips curving under her gauzy dress. Costas’s dark hair folding over his black collar. He was having as much of an effect on her as she was having on him, I saw, and she kept looking up at him, her face warm and open. I felt smaller than I had in years. It was strange how it could still come up on me, that feeling of being a freak. I sank back into the couch.
Costas asked Isabel about her father and mother, about what his mother, Katerina, had been like when she was young. I tried to focus, but it was all so much. My mind went back and back to those moments on the river, with Mary and William together by the water, what might have happened just before it had taken him from her. I tried to remember everything she’d ever said about it, but all I could think of was her face that day she’d told me she couldn’t leave Oakley. I am marked by fate, she had said, for what I have done.
“What did you do?” I whispered. It all came down to that, I realized. I was so close to her, it. I didn’t need to know anything more.
Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets now, smearing the windows. I could see the forest through a strange watery haze. What would it have been like for her, growing up in this house, sneaking out at night to meet someone like