Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [47]
My feet thudded against the earth; my breath was so loud it blocked out every other sound. I stopped only when I saw Mercy Library looming before me, and then I stood before it and took it in. The sign creaked back and forth the way it always had, and the old wooden building rose up like an old ship. Nothing seemed different from the way it had before, not really, though there was no one around. No couples crouching around the corner or groping each other under the front stairs, as the town folk were all too likely to do when Mary was there, weaving her spells over everyone. I don’t know what I’d expected to change, if I thought the whole place would have burnt to the ground the moment Mary lost her breath. That was exactly what I had thought, I realized. It didn’t make any sense for the library to continue standing, or for me to be there before it, staring up at it with my hands buried in my pockets. Nothing made sense anymore.
Slowly I walked toward the front steps, listened to the familiar creak as I walked up them. “I’m here!” I said then, into air, and I almost expected the main door to open and a whoosh of heat and gingerbread to come wafting out to me. For her to be standing in front of me in her long skirt and heels, her hair blackly wild around her face. “Did you like this story?” she would ask. “How real it felt? The best stories always feel more real than your own life.”
“I’m here,” I whispered, again, pressing my hand against the door, willing her to come to it. Surely she was there, in some form. “Mary?” The wind blew across my face then, shuffling through my hair, and I closed my eyes. “Is that you?” The air calmed, and all I could hear was a deep rustling sound, the shaking of tree branches above me. A weird feeling passed over me, and I started to realize how absolutely alone I was out there. The library in front of me like a corpse.
I shook the feeling off and tried the door. I had come to this library hundreds of times, I told myself; it was just a place like any other place, a place I had known and loved and spent the best hours of my life in, my only happy times. I straightened my back. The front door was locked, so I made my way around the library, past Mary’s herb garden, to the back door. I dug at the base of the strongest rosemary bush, and the silver key was there, where it had always been, covered in earth. I heard a tapping sound then, and I found myself looking up, looking for her at the door, my heart lifting, and I realized that I expected her to be there, asking me to hurry inside because there were customers waiting, or because she’d made us some pumpkin soup and rye bread, or because the library was empty and we could practice a bit during the lull. I could almost see her in front of me. If I squinted, she would be there.
I sank down to the ground, into the herbs. The pain seared through my body, like nothing I had ever felt or have ever felt, before or since. Mary Finn had left me. I would never see her again. And I was not prepared to live a life without her. I knew then that I never would have left Oakley while she was still there. Not even to forge a life of my own, not even for the circus, as much as my love for the trapeze and the rope burned inside my body and made me long for something new.
Suicide, they’d said.
I picked myself up from the ground and unlocked the door, pushing my way into the library. Past the stove and the jars of dried herbs, through the stacks, past the tables where she had done her readings, up to the front desk with its trinkets, the silver bracelet and the scattered notebooks, the cigarette papers and the clown figurine.