Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [40]
She lived off the vegetables she stole from farmers, she said. Once in a while she would think of settling in a town or village, but who would hire a woman with a steady stream of tears falling down her face? One time a shopkeeper actually did let her spend a day folding boxes in the back room, but when he saw the pile of boxes that night, perfectly folded but soaked through with tears and falling apart, she was fired on the spot.
And so she kept wandering until, soon enough, the winter came. She had nowhere to go and began shivering at night, when all she could do was try her best to warm herself in piles of hay and straw. Soon even the straw was specked with crystals of ice and snow. The teardrops froze right on her face; icicles hung from her hair.
But unbeknownst to her, not everyone who heard the story of the crying lady turned away in fear. Some lit candles for her, some prayed to her, and some trekked through the snow trying to find her. Some tried to interview her for their magazines, while others proclaimed that she was a hoax, or the devil. But one man, Juan Galindo of the Flying Ramirez Brothers and star of the Velasquez Circus, thought only that she would make a fine addition to the circus sideshow, and Mary, for her part, couldn’t have agreed more.
Juan found Mary curled up in a haystack, outside a town famous for its strawberries and loose morals. As he came upon her he gasped: the tears had all turned to ice that streaked her face and her clothing and hair, and her dark eyebrows were sprinkled with frost. She was as pale as the snow that coated the fields. The ice shone and gleamed on her skin and caught the light until rays of colors came off it. When she shifted in her sleep, the ice clanked and tinkled against itself. Juan knew that the woman in the hay would draw crowds in the hundreds. The tears were like diamonds on her cheeks. He gazed at her, and later he would tell anyone who’d listen that he’d never seen anything or anyone so beautiful as Mary right then.
But the moment Mary woke up and saw Juan standing over her, with his dark skin, burning eyes, and the black mustache twisted into a slight curl on either side, she stopped crying once and for all. Her body became so warm that the ice melted instantaneously, and her pale cheeks became rosy and bright. Her heart beat like drums in her chest.
“At that moment,” she told me on the library floor, “I knew William was dead and gone forever.”
Juan Galindo watched in horror as Mary’s entire body flushed with an unbearable desire. The dollar signs that had been floating in his head vanished along with the tears and the ice, until all that remained was one ordinary girl, lying in wet hay. Juan’s plans for Mary were over before he’d even had a chance to hear her speak, and in sorrow and disgust he turned back toward the night.
“Wait!” Mary cried, and pulled herself out of the hay. “I’m coming with you.”
And there was nothing Juan could do to stop her.
I often thought about Mary walking away from Rain Village to find a new life, and it was around the time I turned fifteen that I really started thinking about leaving my hometown, too. I became convinced that I could persuade Mary to go with me, that she felt as trapped as I did. I began to have long, elaborate daydreams about us traveling the world together in the circus, flying through the air, hearing the crowds roar, and meeting wild, fascinating men like Juan Galindo who would make the