Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [20]
“He was pale, almost completely white. He was only a boy, you know. His hair was like the palest blond dipped in the ashes of a forest fire and his eyes were dark like wet river rocks. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep, and then he’d stalk around and curse the rain and the dark, and me. I would huddle in the blankets and block out every single thing but the warm imprint of his body, the faint smell of eucalyptus still in the bed.”
She stopped, and the night was quiet. All we could hear was the light lapping of the river, the slight wind stirring the grass and weeping willows and oak.
“His voice,” she whispered, “was soft and clipped, as if he’d been born in some other country. But he hadn’t been. Sometimes he could sit for hours and never say a word. He would carve designs into wood. If I moved or sighed, he noticed; he was always watching me, like I was made of glass.”
Her voice was so low I had to lean forward.
“He died. He drowned in the river. I remember how white and cold he was in the water, the leaves sticking to his skin. It’s why I left. Why I left Rain Village the way my older sister had before me. I left my mother, father, sister, and everything I’d known. William died in the river, and the leaves were like leeches on his skin.”
The night seemed to have darkened. Mary looked at the sky. I shivered, and she turned to me, reached up and touched my hair.
“You will fall in love, too. You won’t be unlucky like me.” She pulled herself up and sat cross-legged, facing me. “I left home. I just left, left my family and the rain and the river. And I went all over, and then I came here. Sometimes that is the best we can do in life: seek out new families and homes when the old ones have failed us.”
“Is that when you joined the circus?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She tilted her chin to the sky, her hair sticking every which way. She reached out her hand and slipped it into mine. Her long fingers dwarfed mine, and my pale skin seemed to glow next to hers.
“Do you miss Rain Village?”
She nodded, bending her head to her chest. “We lived in a stone house,” she said a moment later, smiling slightly, “in the middle of a forest. A forest as big as the sky. The river where they found William ran almost straight through the forest, about a ten-minute walk from our house. It was a river unlike any you’ve ever seen, Tessa.”
“I’ve only seen one,” I said. “This one right here.”
“You haven’t ever traveled out of here?”
“My father would never let us. He says the world outside of Oakley is filled with evils.”
She smiled. “I don’t think Oakley is immune to that, no matter what your father says. And why blame the world when it’s right here?” She tapped her chest.
“I think he has evil in him,” I whispered. “He makes all of us cry, sometimes. Is that evil?”
She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I think it is.”
“I want to travel,” I said. “I want to see Rain Village, and the circus.” I tried to call forth a picture in my mind. “What was the river like?”
“Oh,” she said, closing her eyes but holding my hand tight, “it was filled with salmon and other pink fish. The fishermen used to set their lines and let themselves drift along the water. They’d fall asleep like that, sprawled out on the fishing boats, the rain plinking down on their bodies.”
“That sounds terrible,” I said. “All that rain.”
“It was weird,” she said. “No one there complained about the rain, the dampness. There it was just normal. When I left, I baked myself in the sun, and I’ve been brown ever since. Before, in Rain Village, I was as pale as a ghost. I didn’t even know how curly my hair was until I left home and saw it dry for the first time.”
“That’s not true!”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “There, my face was covered in freckles, from the rain. When I left my skin turned completely clear. See?”
I leaned in and stared at her face, her brown, smooth skin. I gasped. “It’s true!” I said.
“Unless I’m lying, of course.” She laughed, and I was relieved, seeing her happy. “Everyone there was a storyteller, you know. At night