Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [44]
I don’t know what it was that led me to the river. Maybe I had some kind of premonition, the way Lollie Ramirez had had before her brother fell from the wire, or maybe it started to hit me that something wasn’t right in the way Mary had been acting, or in the way Mary had ever acted, burying herself in Mercy Library in the middle of a farm town like Oakley, leaving the circus and her home and her sisters, everything that had ever meant anything to her. Maybe I was a bit haunted, too, by the image of William in the river, pale and floating, and the girl who cried so many tears that they turned her skin to ice. A horrible thought came to me, that I had lost her, right then. It was the oddest thing; I just put the thought out of my head and kept on running.
I ran until I could see through the trees, and then suddenly, from the hill where I stood, the whole thin river lay before me.
What I saw first was the bright color on the river. I thought it was some sort of fish floating on the surface until I recognized Mary’s long and brightly patterned dress. It was the dress and colors I had watched deepen in the sink out in back of the library a dozen times, watching Mary knead it in the water and lay it out to dry. I knew how the red and the orange and the silver smeared together under the water, that it was like staring into a dark, blurred sun. I knew how the colors were muted in the daylight, dry, and how the fabric rubbed against the paleness of her ankles.
I saw the white of Mary’s face—then her chin turned up to the sky, her dark hair spreading around her. Everything passed so quietly. It was only after a few moments that it struck me that something had happened, though, in a way, I think I had always known it, just as I had always known I would never see her again once I left Oakley. It is why I haven’t left already, I realized. I moved down past the trees and toward her as two shouting men, who seemed to have just come upon her, pulled her from the river. Careful with her as they pulled her to the riverbank, they lifted her from the water as if she were a child. It was all wrong—them moving and breathing and going red from the effort, and her lying there, blank and dull.
I don’t remember how I came to be right there, next to her, reaching for her as if I were the one who was drowning.
Once she was on the ground, I could see plainly how her body was filled with water. I watched the men pump down on her breast and breathe into her mouth. I knelt by her. I stroked her forehead and pushed back her hair. Leaves twisted through it, and I thought back to her stories, the ones she had told me over the years. I had the strangest sense that I was hearing the tale from Mary’s lips. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the vibration of her voice humming in my ear.
“And then she drowned in the river.”
With Mary’s head in my hands, her black coiled hair wrapped around my wrists like seaweed, I couldn’t see straight. My heart was a blinding light in my chest, blank and searing. I couldn’t believe what was happening, yet it was true down to my core; the world had already shifted for me completely. Sometimes, when tragedy enters a life, it can feel like something that has always been there. For me it was as if everything in my life had moved, and had always been moving, toward that moment.
As I held her there, I suddenly noticed a bright spot on her breast. I looked to see if the two men had noticed, but they’d turned away to give me a moment with Mary alone. I leaned into her face until her cold forehead touched my skin. I trailed my fingers down her neck until I felt the thin chain that circled it. On the end of the chain I felt a ring, which I pulled from the dress surrounding it and brought into the light. The light hit it, illuminating the tremendous colors that can only be hidden in an opal stone.
CHAPTER NINE
The world