Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [64]
Suddenly I wanted to show all of them. If there had been rope strung up across the backyard I would have leapt up right then. Look, I would say. Look what I can do.
I scurried up the steps and into the car. I knocked on the door and then stood, waiting, for a long, breathless moment. There was no response. Raising my fist, I slammed against the door again and again until I felt my fist fall into air and saw her standing over me.
In the daylight she was just as magnificent as she had been before. Glitter still clung to her cheeks, and her hair was like flames around her face. Her clothes were stark and black, her collar stiff. She looked calmer than she had before, but sad, too, as if she’d been crying.
“You?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come because Marionetta sent me,” I said. “She told me about you, everything, and I’ve been waiting so long to find you.”
She sighed, before I could say another word. “But I told you . . .”
I drew my hand out of my skirt pocket, unclasped my fingers.
Lollie gasped. I looked at her face, reflected in the lights of the ring, watched as the rays of color hit her with the forces of memory, desire, and regret.
“You know this ring,” I said. “You know I knew her.”
“Marionetta,” she whispered, then looked back up at me with her intense, hazel eyes. “Who are you?”
“Tessa,” I said, staring back at her. “Tessa Riley.”
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said, nodding.
“Recognize me?”
“I’ve seen you before,” she whispered, and then she stepped aside and motioned for me to come in. She sat, offering me a seat, and I lowered myself onto a velvet chair lined in gold wood. Leaning toward me then, she placed her hand on my wrist. A speck of glitter fell into my palm. She looked straight into my eyes so long that I had to look down. I had a thousand questions beating at me, but something told me to stay quiet, let her speak first.
Gently, she turned my wrist over and traced my palm with her fingertip. At first her touch felt calming, soothing, and then I felt a tingling on my skin, a strange sense that she could see right into me. I resisted the urge to snatch my hand away.
“You were close to her,” she said.
I looked into her face. Wrinkles bled from her red lips, and her eyes were soft with age. She wore layers of makeup, I saw, but it looked like it belonged on her face. Like the movie stars in the magazines Geraldine used to bring home, with their white faces and bloody lips. Lollie’s shoulders dropped slightly as she looked down at me.
“She’s dead,” I said.
“Yes.”
The ring still beat in my hand, and I clamped my fingers over it, shoved it into my pocket again. “I should have known,” I said, without realizing it. “I should have seen it.” The words seemed to come out of me on their own. A strange urge moved through me, to tell her things, and I was furious at myself for talking about Mary that way. I didn’t want this to be about Mary, I thought. I didn’t want to be thinking of her all the time.
“You couldn’t have,” Lollie said. “When I was a child I saw my brother fall from the wire before it happened, and even then I couldn’t stop it. The future is full and alive, like a beating heart, but that doesn’t mean you can change it.”
I nodded, looked out the window of her car and toward the Ferris wheel. I watched it spin around and around, imagined sitting at the top of it and staring down at everything.
“It wasn’t an accident with Mary,” I said. “It’s different.”
“It’s our fate,” Lollie said, folding my hand and setting it on my lap. “It doesn’t matter how it comes to us, how it shows itself.”
I looked around then, at the little crucifix hanging on her wall, the Virgin statues lined up on her dresser, the rosary beads hanging from her doorknob. An image of my mother came to my mind, her fingers moving down the length of beads, her lips whispering feverishly. The big top swayed in the wind. I felt a tear slip down my cheek and realized I was too sad, too beaten up, to care.
I could have stopped her, a voice said inside me. You have to pay