Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [54]
“Look!” I shouted, pointing. “I’m going to leave with them.”
All the girls left their machines and ran to where I stood, pressing in toward the dusty windowpanes, craning their necks to see. I turned to a girl next to me, who looked down at me with wide, surprised eyes. “I know the trapeze. I learned from a famous aerialist. I’m going to do it!” She backed away from me, and I could hear the others whispering, laughing, but I didn’t care. Flying Lollie appeared again and again in the posters, her hair glaring red and flowing out behind her, her skin coffee-colored and outlined in dark blue. “Flying Lollie, Dream of the Circus!” the posters screamed. The leotard she wore was made up of thousands of tiny yellow points, and she always lay flat across the bar, her arms spread out on either side like wings.
I didn’t even hesitate. That day I told the foreman I was leaving and collected my pay. I gave Esther a week’s notice and spent every waking moment stretching in that basement, jumping up and down in place, practicing my one-armed swing-overs and forcing my body to fling out from the rope in a clean straight line, with nothing to hold me up underneath but air.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I remember my last night in Kansas City as if it were yesterday. I packed my bag, left the boardinghouse, and camped out beside the railroad line on the outskirts of the city. I was suspended between lives, between my grief and the freedom of being out on my own, about to have my greatest adventure. I pressed my starfish hands on the cold railroad tracks, feeling for rumbling. I lay on my back staring at the moon, remembering those nights when I first learned to read among the cornstalks and those nights, a little later, when my father changed the meaning of those fields so completely. Now I was seventeen years old, free of the burden of family and of love, lying next to a line of tracks and staring at that same yellow moon. Everything was open to me.
The night seemed so full and strange, and to stretch out forever. Dirt and gravel pressed into my back. I stayed awake for hours, despite my exhaustion, imagining what I would say and do, how I would find Flying Lollie and tell her about Mary, about everything I’d learned and done. I closed my eyes and imagined Mary was there lying next to me, that I could reach up and wrap my fingers in the coils of her hair. “I am finally here,” I whispered. “Can you see me?” I felt a breeze pass over my face and sat up, sure I could smell the faint scent of cloves. “Is this how you felt, too?” In the distance I could see the outline of buildings stamped against the sky. I was afraid to breathe. I closed my eyes again and felt the edge of her skirt brush my leg, her hair curl around my finger. Eventually I fell into a deep, dream-filled sleep, my body curled into a ball next to the tracks.
I woke to the sound of voices and rumbling. I jumped to my feet, confused and disoriented, and saw that people had begun gathering behind me and were rapidly lining up on both sides of the train tracks, for miles in each direction. That was how it seemed—like we stretched out for miles. I gathered up my bag and looked around, as if I would see Mary there, waving to me from the other side of the tracks, the sun lighting up her face, her eyes glowing bright blue. Instead I saw crowds of people, more people than I’d ever seen in one place. My heart fell a bit to be back in the world, but the world seemed to have changed completely. The air was heavy with waiting, longing. Children ran through the crowds, and the people surrounding me took