Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [84]
Restless, I slipped on a robe and tiptoed through the hallways, feeling the cool tile under my bare feet. The crosses scattered throughout the house, the twisting wrought-iron railings and candle holders, the earthenware vases filled with roses and other flowers, the sparkling costumes that hung in closets and across doorways and on the line that stretched over the back porch—all of it looked different in the sleeping house, lit only by a faint moon through the open windows.
I let my hands glide over the railings and the walls as I walked from room to room, then past the pool. I plucked a lemon from one of the shimmery trees and turned it over in my hand. I thought of Luis as a young man, falling falling to the ground. I thought of Lollie listening to the screams from the trailer, and I imagined how her heart must have exploded in her chest.
“Nothing before this matters,” I whispered, into air.
With every corner I turned, I was convinced I heard the whisper of spirits. Moonlight dappled the walls, a breeze moved through the room, the crosses throughout the house seemed heavy with meaning. Back in Oakley the world had been flat and stark; here it was filled with memory, story, spirit, and all the colors of the circus and the lemons and roses. I could not stop thinking of Luis falling to the ground, the way he sat by the pool each evening as splendid as a sun.
I walked from room to room, breathing in the scent of the jasmine, imagining the feel of the bar under my hands, myself flying over everything. The memory of it pressed against my palms. It was strange to reconcile the quiet lushness of the house with the clean, precise feeling of flight, my limbs cutting through air and forcing it to sweep from my body in waves. A different feeling took hold of me. The house, the moon, the quiet—it all seeped into me until I had so much energy I could hardly stand it, despite the soreness of my limbs, my ravaged muscles and cracked skin. I thought how I had no body, no father, nothing before what I was right then, and I began running through the hallways, racing right through them as if I could not be contained by anything. I felt absolutely weightless then in a way I had never felt on earth, on the ground—as light as pure air, pure feeling and desire. The breath in my lungs felt like glass. This is all that matters, I thought: the clean feeling of air slicing open.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The days and weeks passed, and the new season loomed before me. I wore my body down to the bone and quickly mastered the new movements Lollie showed me. At practice I had a much easier time with the rope than the flying trapeze. Lollie and Paulo were both appalled to learn that I’d used only the thick rope from a barn and a hardware store before, and that my wrists were scarred from the countless sores that had opened because of it. Paulo threw away my own rope and insisted I work with the corde lisse, the long braided rope all aerialists used. With a swivel and a ring, he attached a padded rope loop to the corde lisse for me to slip my hand through to do the swing-overs. The difference was amazing: the trick was still difficult, still required a complete shoulder rotation, but the padded loop made my grasp on the rope more sure and protected my palm and wrist. Suddenly I was able to do fifty swing-overs at one time, sometimes sixty or more.
“Beautiful!” Lollie would call out. “Just keep the leg straight as you turn, lean your body in.”
I learned to keep my shoulder close to the rope to control the movement, to polish the violent, angry thrusting of the river and the boardinghouse in Kansas City.
“Here it is about creating poetry in the air, not throwing yourself around without even thinking. The more you harness that energy, chica, the more disciplined you make each movement, the more magical you will be. An artista.”
Every day Lollie, Paulo, and