Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [83]
Lollie stopped speaking, and I could see the flush on her skin.
“You know I told you, Tessa, about the moments that change our life, how when Mary saw Juan Galindo in that barn the world changed for her completely?” she asked. “My moment was not filled with a passion that licks through the skin and into the blood. The moment that changed my life, you see, was when I saw my brother Luis fall to the ground and break, the moment I understood how death and accidents wait for us, how the world moves without us.”
The house was silent except for the breeze whispering through the curtains and the sound of Lollie’s breathing, as heavy as if she were asleep. When Lollie spoke of the past she seemed to inhabit it, until I could almost see her transform into the young girl with black gleaming hair and smooth sun-soaked skin. It was hard to distinguish between the weight and shape of her words and the power of the world she was calling back to me.
“Could you feel it in Mary?” I asked. Death seemed like water in the room then, like something you could dip your hands in and touch. “Did you see her in the river? Could you see the way her hair tangled around her neck, in the water?”
I felt strange speaking so casually of Mary’s death. I thought back to those days, to the way Mary had let the mail pile at the door, to me running home to shuck corn and help set the giant dinner table. It was a world that stood in my memory like a perfect photograph, something timeless and complete. I could not imagine that my father had continued to exist past the last moment I had seen him, or that Geraldine was somewhere, too, with vegetables springing up under her fingertips. I thought back to those moments inside the memory I had built, the little moments that would seem so significant later. It made me afraid to walk through my life, never able to see the death that must have cloaked Mary back then, that must have been written on her skin and in her tears like an announcement.
“Yes,” Lollie said. “I could always see the water dripping on her skin. I could smell the salmon and pine of where she’d come from, see the leaves that clung to her body.”
I did not speak.
“That day,” Lollie continued, closing her eyes, “I could feel the water swooping in between her dress and her skin, filling her body with its weight. I was in the cookhouse with the others. At first I thought it was just rain, but when I looked around nothing had changed—the day was still as clear as it had started. I felt the breath go out of her body while everyone around me ate their meat and rice. No one knew a thing. I did not say anything. What could I have said?”
“Why couldn’t I feel it?” I asked her. “How could I not have known that something was going to happen? I was in her library drinking tea out of one of her cracked cups, straightening the things she’d left strewn over the floor. How could she have been drowning at the same time?”
“I don’t know, Tessa,” Lollie said.
“Why did she do it?” I whispered.
Lollie reached out and drew me to her.
“I don’t know why she did what she did,” she said. “Only that it was written on her from the first day I saw her, when she showed up at the Velasquez Circus.”
That night I could not sleep. I tossed in my bed, imagining the water on Mary’s skin, the crack of Luis’s bones as he hit the ground. The world moves without us, I thought. I imagined my father in the cornfield, Geraldine working in her garden, Lollie sobbing in her room from love. I saw myself, younger, back in Oakley, crumpled up on the dirt, clutching my skirt in my hands.
There was no way I was going to sleep that night. I tossed and turned. Each movement revealed a new ache that had burrowed into my body, and nothing brought relief. I lifted my starfish hands and traced the cracks raging through them. “Nothing before this matters,” I thought over