Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [134]
The way she had left me, I thought.
“Thank you,” Isabel whispered, close to tears. I felt thankful then that I could give this to her.
“Did William give Mary a ring?” I asked, suddenly inspired. I didn’t need to be there anymore, I realized. In Rain Village.
“Yes,” Isabel said. “An opal ring. He said it would bind her to him forever.”
“The peasant girl,” I said.
‘Yes,” she said. “That old story the old folks tell. Mary always liked those stories; she was always repeating them to anyone who would listen.”
I smiled at her, genuinely then. “I’m going back to the village,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
I looked at Costas, but knew he didn’t want to leave. I had no idea what would happen to him. All I knew was that the Velasquez Circus was in the last weeks of the season and would be in the South by now, in Mississippi or Florida or some other state with trees that dripped and dangled over swamps. It seemed strange to think about the planned-to-the-minute schedule of the circus train and caravan, when in Rain Village it felt like time had no meaning at all. But the circus was the world I knew. My world.
“I’ll stay just a little longer,” Costas said, smiling at me softly, wistfully. “Can I meet you back at the hotel? Will you be all right?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine,” I told him. I would miss Costas; he was something like a brother or a best friend.
On my way back down to the river, the rain had let up and the moonlight guided me. Something had shifted, and the evening was so bright I had to squint when the trees parted and the light shone directly in. I leaned against a tree and took Mary’s ring from my pocket, holding it in my open palm. I had considered, briefly, giving the ring to Isabel, but I thought the last thing she needed was to be bound to the past more than she was already. We had enough burdens, I thought, all of us. I couldn’t save Mary, I couldn’t change a damn thing, but I could do one thing more.
The ring sparkled and exhaled in the moonlight. I followed the soft path Mary must have walked down hundreds of times before. The ground was wet at my feet, covered in leaves.
When I reached the river, I knelt on the muddy bank and stared into the water. The moon had clouded over, making it difficult to see.
A terrible, piercing longing moved through me. An ache so powerful I could only clench my teeth and wait for it to pass. I bent toward the river, and it was just at that moment that the moon shifted, lighting the surface of the water so that it looked like glass.
I leaned forward, my heart in my mouth.
It was her, unmistakably, on the surface of the river. Mary Finn, just as I remembered her. Her cat’s eyes staring out at me, her long black hair so wild it was like a field of weeds, her silver hoop earrings dropping to her shoulders. Her brown, freckled skin. Her lips the color of coral.
I felt a radiance inside me. A sense of pure light. “Mary,” I said, reaching out to the water.
She smiled at me with her crooked teeth, her full lips curving into a bow. “Did you know that stars die, Tessa?” she asked.
“Yes,” I whispered. I reached down to touch her face. I expected to feel her skin, which had always been soft and warm, like bread just out of the oven, and was shocked when my fingers dipped into the water. Her image scattered over the surface, then disappeared.
I stared into the water, barely able to breathe. As the surface stilled again, I sighed with relief, seeing the contours of her face and shoulders and hair returning. Her long coiling hair. Her blue eyes. Her strong shoulders that could hurl themselves over and under the bar, that could propel her body through air, slice right through it.
It took me a second to realize it was not Mary in the water, swaying slightly across the surface, looking out at me, but my own face coming into relief. My own long hair, my own wide blue eyes staring out at me. I looked up frantically, up and down the stretch of the riverbank, but I was all alone, just as I had been before. The only sound was the faint