Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [132]
I stood up. “Do you mind if I look around?” I asked, interrupting them.
Isabel turned to me. She seemed taken aback.
“If you don’t mind,” I added quickly. “It’s just that Mary described this house to me so many times.”
She relaxed. I realized she was a woman always slightly on edge with people, whereas Mary had been so sure of herself all the time. “Of course,” she said. “Go ahead. Look in her room if you’d like. It’s at the end of the hall. We never touched it, you know. We always thought she might come back. At least, my parents did. But I always knew she was gone for good.”
I stood and watched her for a second. I wanted to ask more, but she had already turned back to Costas. I watched her lean her body into his. I couldn’t deny the stab of jealousy moving through me and berated myself for it. This is not about him, I thought. I slipped up the winding staircase, ignoring the dust that rose up around me as I moved over the carpet, trying not to feel self-conscious. They weren’t paying any attention to me, anyway.
As I moved through the upper hallway, which was covered in flowered wallpaper and cloudy mirrors that hung in a row, I looked into each room: the ornate canopies, shelves lined with dolls, the busy wallpaper. Dust seemed to coat everything. There was something not quite right about any of it, about Isabel living in a house that felt crumbling, barren, frozen in time. I passed what had to have been Katerina’s room, the parents’ room. At the end of the hallway, I recognized Mary’s room right away. The piles of books, everywhere. The ornate red quilt covering the bed. I felt my whole body clench.
I stepped into the room tentatively, as if I expected her to pop out at me, a specter telling me to stop disturbing the dead. But it was empty. It felt empty, like a room in a museum. I spent several long minutes touching every object, trying to imagine what each thing might have meant to her. I picked up a small jewelry box with a ballerina on top, opened it and saw a girl’s silver bracelet, a little bird pin with carved feathers, a gold ring. Was there something of her left in any of this? I thought of my old room in Oakley for the first time in years. Geraldine snoring on the other side of the room, the window that looked out over the fields. There was nothing of me in that room, I thought. I had only passed through it, as if I hadn’t been there at all.
I could hear the rain funneling through the gutter, making a hollow whooshing noise. I walked to the window and tried to lift it. It took a moment to get it to budge. I closed my eyes, imagining her before her life was marked by tragedy and regret, when everything was open to her. The window slid open, flinging dust everywhere, and the scent of rain burst into the room. Or had she just been anxious, I wondered, waiting for her one chance to escape, find something new?
The room felt hushed, strange. Rain slammed onto my hands, which rested on the windowsill. I closed my eyes, trying to will myself back home to that day by the river, her voice in my ear and the grass blades rubbing against my back. Twisting her curls around my fingers as she spoke. I wished more than anything that I could go back in time. What were you trying to tell me? I would ask. What was happening to you? I could remember the way the weeping willows looked hanging over the river, the way the grass had that warm summer smell to it.
You cannot escape your fate, Tessa, or where you come from, she had said.
My mind strained against it. Maybe there is no secret, I thought then. Nothing to find. Maybe her lover died and she could not find happiness in the world after. Couldn’t it be as simple as that? Whatever happened, could it really matter now?
My head hurt. Mary, and then my father, and then Mauro—it was all crowding my vision, swooping through me like the wind that had brought Costas to the circus and led me here. The pain of loss and memory passed into