Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [133]
I threw her jewelry angrily back into the box. How could the memory be so fresh after so many years? No matter how far I went, how much I succeeded, it was always this. This anger, this loss. Everything circled back to it.
I felt I had grasped nothing, trying to piece together who Mary was, why she had drowned herself in the river, why she had picked me out of the crowd and seen something in me that no one had seen before.
I walked to her bed, bent down, and rested my head on the quilt. I breathed in, imagined the imprint of her body on the fabric. How could I get any closer to her than this? No matter what I found in Rain Village, it couldn’t change the fact that she had left me, that I could never get back to her, never love or know her more perfectly than I had. It could never change what my father had done to me. It could never change that there had been a sadness in her I couldn’t understand.
I might never learn the truth, I realized. But even if I could whirl back in time and stand right there next to her as she confronted her fate, standing by the river on that long-ago day, it wouldn’t change who Mary was. What she had meant to me. What I had lost when she left.
When I finally dragged myself back downstairs, it felt as though hours had passed. I thought how hard it would be to get back to the hotel, through the tangled wood. The stairway was so dark I had to feel my way down the banister, into the dim light of the living room.
Costas and Isabel sat side by side on the couch, barely looking up when I entered the room. She was telling him stories, I realized, about his mother, about his grandparents, and as I walked toward them he looked up at me.
“Tessa,” he said, “are you okay?”
Isabel stopped midsentence and followed his gaze. “You miss her,” she said simply, her expression suddenly serious.
“Yes,” I said. I was crying. I brought my hands to my chest and realized the whole front of my shirt was wet with tears.
“I still miss her, too,” she said.
I wiped my face, sat in the chair she had occupied before. I looked at Isabel. Her hair glimmering in the dim light. Her blue eyes focused on mine, sparkling out at me. This must be hard on her, I thought. Learning so much in one day, having the whole world come hurtling through the front door after all the care she’d taken to keep it out. I looked at Costas. It seemed clear then that this was what he had come here for. To be with her, to help her. I wanted to remind him of his wife and son, to tell him not to forget them, but it hit me, right then, that he had left them long before now.
My heart ached. I thought of Mauro, missed him so much it was actually as if a part of me had been cut out.
I turned to Isabel. “Do you know what happened that day?” I asked, finally. “What happened between Mary and William on the river?”
Her face changed. I was surprised at the sadness there. It was clear that she carried grief within her, and now it was all right at the surface. In this old house, surrounded by dust and bones, the rawness of it was almost absurd.
I leaned forward. Met Costas’s eyes and then looked back at her. It didn’t matter to him in the same way, I thought. Knowing what had happened.
“Well,” she said. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, bringing her hand to her face. After a moment she tried again. “I haven’t spoken about Mary in years. All I remember is how wild she was that night. Wild with despair. I remember her and my father yelling. Him calling her names, her screaming back at him. I remember lying under the covers in my room with my hands over my ears, willing it to stop. And then she was just gone. I felt like it was my fault, as if I’d willed her away. The house was always quiet, every day after.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “She spoke of you, you know. How much she missed you.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
Her face lit then, and I told her everything I could remember Mary saying about her. How smart Isabel had been. How terrible it