Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [33]
Afterward he picked me up like I was some sort of wounded bird and carried me inside. I kept my eyes shut as he washed the blood from my legs with a cloth from the kitchen sink. After carrying me back up the stairs, he laid me on my bed as smoothly as a dress you planned on wearing to church the next day. Geraldine stirred slightly but did not wake. When I finally heard the door shut behind him, I turned on my side and wept.
The next day I woke up feeling as if my insides had been scooped out and replaced with fire. Every part of my body hurt as I moved from side to side. I stayed in bed. I wrapped my hips in towels and paper to soak up the blood, and hid the soiled sheets underneath the mattress.
I thought of the library: Mary unlocking the thick wood doors, the line of people that would surely be waiting by now. It felt like a parallel life I had been dreaming about but had never actually led.
“What the hell are you still doing in bed?” Geraldine asked, glaring at me.
I closed my eyes and ignored her, and soon my mother was in the room, already covered in dirt and exasperated to have been called away from it.
“What is going on here, Tessa Riley?” my mother asked. “I will not have you jeopardizing that job.”
“I’m sick,” I said, looking at her dully.
“Goddamnit.” She shifted angrily, then caught sight of something, a dash of blood on the sheet. Her face became softer, almost the way it had been once, back when she loved me and thought I’d keep growing, back when she still tucked me in at night. Something inside me almost caved in right then.
“Well, well, you’ve become a woman,” she said. “A miracle.”
I looked at her then, and the feeling I’d had a moment before, that pinprick of longing, disappeared. Suddenly I ached for Mary so much it was a physical pain inside me. I wished I could will her to my side, wished I could ask her to explain the world to me. I winced, and shame seeped into every cell of my body at the thought of her knowing what had happened to me.
I stared at the ceiling. Later, when Geraldine perched herself on the side of my bed and made snorting noises to annoy me, I closed my eyes and imagined myself a million miles away, in Rain Village, with the rain pounding down over me and leaves sticking to my skin.
The next day I felt better but couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed and go back to work. I didn’t know how I would face anyone, let alone Mary. I was cheap, disgusting, like some old discarded thing. The power I had felt in my body up on the trapeze, practicing twirls and layouts, felt like some lie I had been told. My father had burrowed into me and brought out the truth: that I, Tessa Riley, was a freak, something monstrous. The kids in the square had known. He had known.
At my mother’s insistence, I went down for dinner that second night. My father behaved as if everything were normal. If it weren’t for the sharp ache in the center of my body, the image of the corn bent in front of the moon, haunting me, I might have thought that I’d imagined everything.
The phone rang, and I almost jumped out of my chair. We all looked to my father. The phone never rang in our house and was only there for the direst emergencies.
“Lucas?” my mother asked, her voice tentative, almost meek.
He continued eating, wordlessly. We sat there, and the air in the room grew heavy with his silence. The phone continued to ring.
“Leave it,” he said, after nearly a full minute had passed.
The next morning I pretended to leave for work and instead wandered through the countryside, climbing trees and spreading myself out in the fields. Alone, I could just go blank and dull, stare at the clouds until I felt like I was