Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [35]
I pulled myself from the water and ran back to the tree, and didn’t even feel it when I wrapped my wretched, split-open palm around the rope and hoisted myself back up. Grunting with effort, I hauled myself upside down with one arm, which shook so badly I was sure I’d drop on my head at any second. And then I squeezed my eyes shut, steeled myself, and pushed my body back down again in the other direction. My shoulder felt like it was splitting in two, then popped out of the socket for the second that it took for me to rush down.
I dropped to the ground, exhausted. Crying from pain. Crying, for the first time, about everything.
When I stumbled home at dinnertime, my parents and brothers and sister stared right at me and gaped. I could feel my father’s eyes on me.
“What the hell happened to you?” Geraldine asked. “You look like you got runned over.”
My brothers snorted. My father reached over and smacked Geraldine on the face. She didn’t even flinch as her right cheek turned red and tears trickled down her face.
“I’ll be okay,” I said quickly. “I was just working at the library and fell.”
“You shouldn’t be climbing those ladders, girl,” my mother said. “You could slip right through one of those rungs.”
I looked to the ground, but all I saw was the image of a lone girl, inscribing circles in the air.
Over the next few days I went back and back. I destroyed my body against that tree, dreamt about it when I was in bed or at the dinner table. My father’s eyes followed me through every room in our house, under every stalk in the fields, but I blocked them out with the sheer force of my body slamming against oak and rope. By the third day I could do two twists in a row—with excruciating pain all through my shoulder and upper arm. The more the better, I thought, and swung myself back up again.
I knew Mary would be wondering what had happened to me, and I was nagged by the thought of her sitting in the library. But she hadn’t come looking for me, either. As I shimmied up the rope and wrapped my legs around it, letting it sink into my skin, I tried to convince myself that she would know I was all right. Part of me felt that I was in the library anyway, that my real self was shelving books and stamping the book cards, sitting down with Mary to a lunch of vegetables and dark bread, while here, by the river, my shadow self twirled from the tree and back out again, clinging to a length of rope.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When I hadn’t shown up at Mercy Library for well over a week, Mary came looking for me. I had spent the day by the river practicing, honing my new trick, ripping my shoulder again and again. When I entered the kitchen and saw Mary sitting right there waiting for me, at my parents’ dinner table, my mouth literally fell open with shock.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, suddenly furious. She looked so radiant and out of place in the dark wood room, surrounded by my bulky siblings and my enormous, glowering parents. Their skin was pale and blotchy, while hers was golden and smooth. It felt like she was playing a joke on me, purposefully making my world seem even uglier than it had before.
Her eyes widened. “I haven’t seen you in over a week, Tessa. I didn’t know what to do. I kept calling.”
Her words barely registered. I wanted to scream at her, to pull her beautiful hair and slap her. Irrational, I felt that she had come there just to humiliate me, the way she was sitting right next to him, my father, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. She doesn’t know, a part of me whispered, and yet in my pain and frenzy I was sure that she had come just to rub