Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [73]
“She’s fine,” he pronounced, looking down at everyone to the sides. I didn’t realize then how badly the net could hurt you, if you took a bad fall into it. Coming at you in the wrong way, the rope could feel like tiny knives. If you fell at the wrong angle, it could break your neck.
At that moment I could barely feel anything but his palm under my skin.
“You’re okay, Tessita,” he said. “You want to get out of this thing?”
I nodded, and with one long shift of his body he moved both of us to the side, then held me to his chest with one arm as we jumped down to the ground.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lollie said, comforting me. “You’re not used to the big top. You can try again in a few days.”
But I saw that their anticipation had waned. The twins had already left, along with Carlos and about half of the Vadalas. They had expected a pupil of Marionetta and had seen a girl who couldn’t even catch the bar. “I want to try again now,” I said, staring straight at Lollie.
She looked surprised but nodded.
They have no idea, I thought, what this body can endure.
Paulo ascended again and threw out the bar to me. This time I leapt out and grabbed it, even managed to pull myself up into it before being hit with the empty space around me. From the air, it was even worse than from the ground. Nothing could have prepared me for the way it felt being suspended over nothing, for that one bar to be the only thing in the world keeping you up there. The bar scraped under my legs where the net had cut into me.
Stop being a coward, I said to myself. Stop being such a freak. But my hands would not let go of the ropes on either side of me. I could feel every pair of eyes on me, pinning me to the spot. I looked down at the net and felt my eyes fill with tears.
“Let’s get her down from there,” I heard Mauro say.
Without even hesitating, Paulo leapt out onto a second trapeze and swung out to me. I winced as he approached, but then I felt his arm wrap smoothly around me, whisking me off the bar and into the air. As I heard Lollie yelling for him to be careful, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to cry.
When I opened them, I was on the ground, shaking with shame and confusion. I looked up at the bar swinging over us, and then, just behind it, I saw a rope hung up in the top rigging.
My heart leapt desperately. “That!” I said, pointing, hearing the crowds outside, seeing almost everyone else leave. “Let me try that, just for a minute.”
Paulo rolled his eyes. “We’re out of time,” he said. “Just try again another time. Get used to the feel of it.”
“We have to get ready now, really,” Lollie said.
“Just for one second,” I said. “Please. You’ll see.” Tears ran down my face.
It was Mauro who shrugged his shoulders and asked, “Why not? Let’s go.”
He unpinned the rope that was hooked into the ground, then maneuvered it down, the way the roustabouts did during the shows. It unfurled, then dropped to the ground like a woman’s braid.
I walked purposefully to the rope. I looked up into Mauro’s black eyes, then over at Lollie’s hazel ones. I blocked out everyone, everything else but Mauro, Lollie, and the rope in front of me.
I grabbed it and shimmied my way up. I could feel the air in the room change as I stopped with my feet about five feet off the floor, as I released my body until I was dangling from the rope by one hand. I twisted the cord around my wrist once, then flung my body up into one of the windmills I had perfected by the river alone. The swing-over.
I was reduced to one motion, over and over. I poured all my rage and sorrow and hope into that one motion: the swing up and back down again, the rotation of the shoulder as it moved out of its socket and back in