Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [39]
“You can always leave,” Mary said then, looking right at me. “There is always more to discover, more selves inside you that just need to come out.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
She paused, then leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Now, why don’t you show me what you’ve been doing on this rope of yours?”
We went inside, and I hauled myself up to the bar, the shelves of books towering on either side of me. Mary went to help the few readers who had gathered while we were outside, then came back to me.
“You’re improving, Tessa,” she said, as I held my body straight in the air, with only my palms on the bar.
For a moment, I was tempted. I felt my muscles pulling, my hand reaching for the cable on the side of the trapeze. I could show her my new trick, release it into air.
“Why don’t I show you how to flip down?” she said, in the moment I spent hesitating. “I think you’re ready. And I can show you my own special trick, one of the things that made Marionetta so loved and desired.”
“Marionetta?”
“That was my name, up there, Tessa. Marionetta,” she said, stretching the name out until I could feel it wrap around me.
I forgot about the rope, my new trick, my hours by the river, completely.
She slipped off her skirt to the leotard underneath, then reached up for the bar. She smiled at me and started to swing. For a moment, as I watched her fly through the air, I imagined that there was only this, this moment, right here.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I remained closed in, as if I occupied two separate worlds: the world that my father stood over, a dark, secret place where the moon and the corn masked unspeakable things, and then my world, which was always Mary’s. I walked into Mercy Library each day, and the earth-pounding sun turned to mist. The smoke and the smell of cloves and cinnamon wove around me, and I began hearing the patter of rain, seeing the flash of fish out of the corner of my eye, feeling the swoosh of the trapeze under my hand. The force of Mary’s world was so strong that it even changed the air around her. What would it be like to swim in a river, I wondered, with rain sprinkling all around and fish sliding against your skin? How would it feel to spin five times in the air before dropping into a silver net?
And then I shrugged out of myself and those nights in the field and threw glitter across my skin and tumbled across the floor, as Mary danced and clapped. You could see a wildness in her still, left over from her days on the trapeze: her skin made for circus lights to bounce off it, legs that could curl past her neck and over her shoulders.
More and more I asked Mary about the places she’d lived before coming to Oakley, before she’d taken over the abandoned library on the outskirts of town and begun cataloguing the minutiae of all of our lives. I stayed at the library so late that my parents would be in bed by the time I got home. In the night I would sneak down to the river and practice, beating my body against the rope. I wound my body down to a spark of energy, so tight that I could fly out of the room, twist and disappear when my father came near me.
I began to imagine that other places and lives existed for me, too, places where I could become what Mary saw in me. “Rain Village,” I repeated to myself in the dark, and dreamt of floating boys with white skin. It seemed so far from the stark, bright fields of Oakley, the heavy manure scent that was everywhere, the swooping wooden house inhabited by a father who never seemed to sleep.
Most of all I dreamt of the circus: the sequined women with red lips who’d hang from ropes by their ankles, the men who could order a row of lions to walk on their hind legs, the flames streaming from men’s mouths, and the sticks a girl could juggle while hanging by her hair. Mary described these things for me again and again.
What Mary described was like nothing I had ever seen or heard of, and the one thing I needed was something to imagine, something far from home. She told me