Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [46]
I had the sudden, crazy idea then that I could still steal her away, take her body and bring it back to Rain Village, bury her in the forest, by the river. She had never belonged in Oakley, I thought. I was so strong by then, my whole body powerful and muscled; I could carry Mary across states, I thought, through Colorado, Idaho, up to the Pacific Northwest, where she had told me Rain Village was located. Just the two of us moving through the world, like I’d always imagined.
I clenched my eyes shut, pulled my knees into my chest, and felt like I, too, was being put into the ground behind the library, the chain tangled around my neck, dirt piling up on top of me. Guilt seized me like two massive arms and kept me pinned to the bed, gasping for breath. I just could not think of it: her body in the river, the way we’d pulled her onto the bank. The air itself turned golden with it, heavy like syrup. I saw Mary, again and again, sitting next to me that day on the riverbank, talking about the fate her tea leaves had spelled out for her. Warning me.
“Tessa,” Geraldine said, and I could hear my mother then, appearing at the door, feel them leaning into me, but it was as if I had vanished, as if I had never been there at all.
I woke a few days later and found I couldn’t bear to stay in my bed a moment longer. Outside, the sky was a pale, smoky gray, and a wind seemed to push through the trees, through the cornstalks, making them sway and shimmer. The world seemed to have been emptied out. The branches pressed into the sky, cutting through it with thick black lines, and there was no sound except for the faint whistling of wind. I lifted the window a crack and pushed my fingers through. The air felt like ice. It was December already, I realized, nearing up on Christmas. At Mercy Library Mary would be brewing cider with cinnamon sticks, baking gingerbread in the tiny stove. On any December day you would find an array of farm folk, their cupboards filled with canned vegetables and jams, their cellars stocked with dried meat and mounds of potatoes, spread through the stacks and at the tables with collections of Boccaccio or Baudelaire or the Brontë sisters open before them, breathing in Mary’s spice scents. I thought of all those mornings when I had looked out onto a world just like this, barren and raw and ghostly, and felt filled with life, because of her.
The house seemed unusually empty, quiet. Geraldine’s bed was unmade. I had that strange feeling again, like I had vanished completely. Like I didn’t even exist. I touched the windowsill, the fine layer of dust that had collected on it. I touched the pane of glass and watched the imprints of my fingertips slowly fade out. Outside, the corn swayed back and forth, dried out and ragged in the winter air.
I realized then that I needed to go back. I needed to go back to the library and take what I could of her, to prove that she had existed, that we had existed together. I pulled on a sweater and pants and boots, I couldn’t get them on fast enough, and then I took off, slamming down the stairs and through the front door, past the hedges my father had attacked that strange, ancient morning, onto the road that ran into town.
Mary, I breathed, into air, and she seemed to flare up before me, with her straw basket full of vegetables and books, her dangling silver earrings, and her long skirt that trailed behind her as she walked. “Mary!” I called, and I could just see her there, in the distance, her head flung back, laughing, calling to me. Smoking a cigarette with a book open on her lap. Swinging on the trapeze, whooping with laughter. Floating on the river, her wet hair sticking to her skin.
I flew through the town square and past the lumberyard. I didn’t care that I was making people stop in their tracks and stare, or that the cold seemed to slip under my skin, turning my body inside out. I just needed to get back to her. I lived so much in books, I thought, it was hard, sometimes, to tell what was real. I remembered all the times Mary had read me stories and poems