Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [49]
I ran through the stacks to the back of the library, my heart in my mouth, my feet storming across the wooden slats, and I pushed the stool out and leapt up on it, then reached for the trapeze. I curled my fingers around the cold metal. The moment my hands touched the bar, everything felt different. I had a place, I thought, beyond Mercy Library and Riley Farm. As I pulled myself to my feet, gripping the ropes with my hands, I knew I had made a decision.
It’s what she had wanted, I thought. What she had seen in me. What she had given to me.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TEN
It is strange, how people drop out of your life, like tears. The way the whole world can shift and change, the way you can choose to remake it. Choose to become someone new. When I left Oakley, Kansas, I was only sixteen years old, but it seemed so long in coming that I might as well have been fifty. I had never stopped longing to be a part of my family and my town, no matter what, but it was too late for that now; it was too late for a lot of things, and my heart was so chock-full of grief and love and hope and wildness that I thought I would burst with it. As I walked into the ice-cold night, under the black sky sprinkled with stars like sharp diamonds, I thought of Mary, all those years before, heading out into the world, leaving everything she’d known behind. I remembered that first time I’d left my house and taken off running for the town square, determined to find something more in the world.
I left Riley Farm with a bag flung over my shoulder filled with clothes and books, my money and Mary’s ring sewn into the hem of my skirt. I wanted to have a life separate from everything that had come before, and back then I imagined it was possible to have a life apart from Oakley and my family, as if I could slip out of my own skin like a snake. I imagined it was possible to have a life apart from Mary and what she had been to me, though I was heading toward a city she herself had created in my mind, and I was going there to find the Velasquez Circus, which I knew came through the city every spring. I was stepping into my future, though everything I knew of the circus was wrapped in Mary’s memory and stories, the smell of spices. Before I had simply dreamt that one day I too could work under those lights, unbound by normal laws of gravity and flight. Now I knew there was nowhere else for me, in all the world.
I was not prepared for the grief that moved through me as I passed the neighboring farms, as I cut through the town square for the last time, grief that went beyond Mary Finn. I knew my sister would wake up to find my bed and closet empty, that she would feel under my mattress and find it smooth and bookless, that she would find the small postcard I’d left on her dresser, a picture of a clown I’d found with Mary’s things. I knew my father would rage through the house, that the walls would sag and strain with his anger, that Geraldine and my brothers and my mother would have to tiptoe around him for days, eat with their heads bent over their bowls, not making a sound. When I got to the edge of town and the wide, main road that led to Kansas City, I started to run, tears streaming down my face, imagining him coming after me with legs that could run whole miles for every tiny step I took in the snow.
The faster I ran, the safer I thought I’d be, as if sheer distance could separate me from him, my grief, everything of the past. I walked for days and days, from morning till night, without stopping. It was as if stopping would whirl me back to Oakley and to the cornfields and to Mary, floating in the river, her body wrapped in leaves. And so I walked and walked, letting my feet crease and freeze and blister, until one day the city appeared before me, its spiked skyline outlined above the horizon. Mary had told me all about the clanging of streetcars and the grates that cut up the roads, about the laundry hanging from lines that stretched from rooftop to rooftop, and about the smog that curled around chimneys and the office buildings that stacked floor