Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [48]
I thought of the millions of stories pressing against each other in the library stacks. So many lives and feelings and tragedies. This doesn’t matter, I thought. None of this matters. There were countless other stories to wrap my head around, weren’t there? Like Sister Carrie’s? The girl who had gone to make a life for herself, who had started in the factories and ended up rich and feted. Just focus on that, I told myself.
I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could but found myself thinking, for the first time, of the river.
Not how she picked herself up from her mattress, tied on her shoes, and walked those few minutes down to the bank. Not what she must have thought as she stood there, staring into the water. Whether she saw her own face staring back at her, or William’s face floating on the water, or if she saw another river, teeming with pink fish and rain. Whether she thought of the ice that had covered her skin, Juan Galindo coming upon her as she lay in ice-streaked hay. Whether she thought of leaving the circus, coming to Oakley and to Mercy Library, coming to me.
What I thought about was the feeling she must have had when she felt herself slipping, when the water moved into her mouth and lungs and the water plants twisted around her legs. The way she must have given herself over to the water and felt herself sink into it, become part of it, felt her mind go blank and soft. I stood there by Mary’s desk, imagining it. How the water would feel against my own skin, curling into my mouth. How if I allowed it, if I chose it, I would never have to be without her. Never have to go back to Riley Farm. Never have to lie back in the cornfield staring at the moon, or run past the kids in the town square and hear them laughing. Never have to be the freakish, strange girl with hands shaped like starfish and as small as plums. Never have to face my own life. The river was only steps away. I wondered if Mary’s feet had left indents in the earth, for me to follow.
I let my mind wind down and stop. Concentrated on the feeling of the water, what I imagined it would be like. Let my mind let go of everything in the world but that feeling, the emptiness of being so far below the earth and air.
I focused so hard on the blackness, the silence, that I stopped smelling, hearing, feeling the faint chill against my skin. I stopped feeling myself at all, and it was then that I saw it. A twirling, tiny shape, a speck really, in the center of all the darkness. Flicking back and forth. Getting closer and closer. Filling up my mind until all I could see was a perfect image of a body whirling around a white rope, cutting cleanly through the air. It took me a minute to realize that it was my own body I was seeing. My own body covered in sequins, stretched out in a smooth, gleaming line, moving around and around, unaffected by gravity, unaffected by anything of this earth.
I opened my eyes and realized there were tears running down my face.
I felt it, deep in my body.
“You need to make a life for yourself,” she had said.
“Far away from here,” I said out loud, finally realizing what she had meant. “In the circus.” The room seemed to spin around me. I could walk into the river, I thought, or I could live in the air. Spin in the air until I became pure light, until I transcended everything. Suddenly the desire moved through me so strongly I almost cried out, and all the muscles in my body seemed to break open, all at once. It was a strange feeling. I thought of wings lifting up and spreading in the air, expanding and unfolding and opening out, and I thought of Mary in the brochure from the Velasquez Circus, a spinning blur of light as she flew through space.