Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [41]
The more I fantasized about the circus, the crazier it seemed to me that someone could ever leave such a life, especially to come to a place like Oakley. There are better worlds than this one, I thought. How could Mary not agree, when she was the one who’d shown them to me? By then I could do one hundred one-armed swing-overs. In the silver box I had hidden downstairs, buried in one of Mary’s boxes of leotards, I had three years’ worth of savings—well over two hundred dollars.
It took me several weeks to get up the courage to talk to Mary about my plans, but on one particularly hot day, when we closed the library at lunchtime to gather strawberries and then wash them in the river, I took a deep breath and released all my hopes into the air.
The river was lined with weeping willows that hung and dipped into the water, and we dunked the strawberries in before biting off the stems and popping the fruit into our mouths.
“Mary,” I said, looking at the juice-splattered grass I’d gathered up in my hands, “I want to join the circus someday, maybe. Do you think I could?”
I was afraid she would laugh at me, though I should have known better. I always should have known Mary better than I did. She threw a strawberry stem into the river and looked over at me.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”
“You think I can do it?” I asked. “Could I be a flyer?”
“You are a flyer already, Tessa,” she said.
“Come with me,” I said, my heart pounding. “We could go together, to Kansas City.”
I could not even look at her. The seconds passed so slowly I was sure that time had stopped. I pressed my fingertips into the earth.
“No,” she said, finally. “You have to go alone. I cannot leave here, Tessa.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why not?”
She would not answer. After a long pause, she said, “I know what it’s like to feel trapped, like you do. You should leave before something happens. Something bad happened in Rain Village, Tessa, because I stayed too long.”
“Come with me, then,” I said.
She reached out her hand and placed it on mine. “I’m sorry,” she said, quietly. It felt like I was pressing against glass.
“Why can’t you leave?” I asked again. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t think I can explain it to you,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just not enough. The world is larger than you can even imagine, but sometimes it just closes in on you until there’s no room left.”
“But why did you come here in the first place? Why here, out of everywhere? Why can’t you leave?”
She hesitated for several long moments. When she finally spoke, the words seemed heavy and ill formed in her mouth. “I heard about Oakley once,” she said, “after a show we did in Kansas City. Someone talked of a town out west that was cradled by hills and ripped up by farmland. I kept asking questions, and the more I heard, the more I was sure it was the place for me to rest in. I was so tired then, Tessa. I could not stop thinking, and remembering, and I was just beaten down. I had visions of people following me, hunting me down. When I found out about the library and how it was just sitting here, I knew I had to come.”
“But why here? I don’t understand.”
“I hope you don’t ever understand, Tessa, what it is like to be so tired of life.”
I didn’t understand anything at all. “But why are you tired? Why can’t you leave now?” I let the grass drop out of my hands.
“I just can’t do it, Tessa. It’s in the cards, and in the tea leaves.” She laughed at herself, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all. Something was happening in her that I couldn’t see or touch. “Back in the circus, the fortune-tellers always avoided me; they could see what was coming. I can’t help it, not now: I am marked by fate for what I’ve done.”
My heart welled up inside me as I felt the world slamming shut. We stayed there, quiet. I stared out at the water, and at the weeping-willow branches hanging down and grazing the water,