Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [69]
The same electricity crackled through the air as the night before: the groan of the Ferris wheel gearing up, townspeople meeting up with their friends and heading toward the field in groups, coins jangling in their pockets. But I was not part of it that night. I was silent as Lollie and I walked back to the train, and I do not think she minded, herself lost in memory and regret.
“I’m going to lie down and rest,” I said, when we reached the car.
“Yes,” she said. Then, after a pause, “I know you miss her, Tessa,” she said. “I can see her in you.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling the tears beating against my heart.
Inside, I spread myself over the mattress. I tried to focus on Lollie’s creams and perfumes that lined the little dresser, but her voice curled around me, filling my vision with images of Mary roasting vegetables with Lollie or following Juan Galindo in the snow. She too must have felt comforted once, a long time before, knowing Lollie was close by. I shook the image off me. I saw the opal ring shimmering against Mary’s breast, with its thousands of colors. No! I thought quickly of Mauro’s curving eyelashes, his black eyes looking out at me through them, but then blinked the image away, furious.
It had been one year since I’d found Mary in the river, I realized then, and I had never, in all the time I’d been away, shared her with anyone else, never heard anyone else even speak her name.
Now stories of her colored the air, drifted across the camps that spread over the field, behind the midway and big top. She was part of the air we breathed. They had all held her name on their lips, had all whispered it in their sleep, just as I had.
Tears slipped over my face. I gulped for air.
I had not spoken of Mary either, not to anyone. I had not spoken of her in the factory, or as I’d passed through the city streets, clamping my hands over my ears to muffle the clanging of the trucks and streetcars, or as I’d waited by the train tracks, dreaming of a new life. The times I’d tried with Geraldine had been miserable failures. To speak of her now, with people who had known her and people she herself had described for me, was too confusing, too strange, and I did not think I could do it, though I knew that the Ramirezes longed to hear of her, what her life had been like. They all did, all the people in the circus, and for the ones who hadn’t known her, like Ana, Mary was a legend that swirled through their lives and made them yearn for spice scents and coils of black hair and rivers filled with pink fish.
Even Lollie longed to hear about Mary, though she herself had felt Mary’s life throughout the years. I came to understand that Lollie had felt Mary’s life in bits, in slivers of images or scents or dreams, not in whole slices as if she’d been there. For Lollie, the world was not open and transparent, like a sheet of glass. Every seer has lapses and gaps, I would learn, moments when the world does not offer itself but lies as flat as a sketch before her. Lollie could feel Mary’s heart in moments, feel her leafing through books and shuffling through documents that she would drop into thick files, feel her staring out the library windows during all those long hours she was alone, remembering the feel of rain streaming down her skin, the tang of the river, the mud that sucked at her feet, the pattering and plinking that never stopped. Lollie had felt the pain that had pulsed through Mary’s veins, but I, who had been right there with her, hadn’t understood or seen it at all.
How could I put her into words? How could I describe