Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [86]
And no matter how happy I was, how in love I was with Mexico and the circus, I still dreamt of rain. Some nights I woke with my heart pounding in my chest, longing to leave Mexico and to find Rain Village, which must have been a million miles from the house and the pool and the trees that dropped lemons to the ground. I heard Mary’s voice in my ear, thought of the riverboat that snaked up the thin river, how the sky must turn black as the riverboat neared. I saw the thousand colors of the opal ring sparkling up from her neck. I felt a darkness swooping over me, threatening to pull me to the river’s bottom, threatening to fill my lungs and drown me.
I would hear her voice in my ear, wrapping around me the way her scent had once.
“There’s a secret there,” she would say. “I want you to find it.”
It was late February when Lollie announced that we had to begin preparing my costume for the new season. We were sipping coffee at the big table in the early morning, getting ready for another long day of rehearsal. All of us were there. It was a normal morning: the sky was hung over a bit with rain, we were quiet and tired, and Victoria had set out a large bowl of mangoes and oranges with a pot of steaming coffee. I was slathering my toast with butter when Lollie said, “I think we should make you a costume covered with rhinestones, Tessa, so that you’ll look like a diamond in the air.”
I looked up at her. I had almost forgotten that our time in Mexico was a rest stop for the winter and that the day was approaching for us to gather up the circus and head north, where we would pick up the rest of the acts and start the new season.
“You’re ready,” Lollie said, smiling over the table at me. “Maybe not for the flying trapeze, but your solo act is more than ready.”
I looked to Paulo, who agreed.
“We want your solo act to be part of our main act,” Lollie said. “We can work it out with Jorge, your pay and your sleeping arrangements.”
I nodded, speechless.
“We can negotiate more then,” Carlos said. He turned to me. “We can probably get you twenty dollars a week for now. Jorge, Mr. Velasquez, pays me one lump sum for all of us in the Ramirez acts, and I divvy it up. That should be fair for you and increase profit for all of us. We’re a strong act already—the two star acts of the show—but you’ll make us even stronger.”
“Does that sound fair to you, Tessa?” Lollie asked.
“Yes,” I said, overcome. This was more money than I’d ever thought I’d make, anywhere. I would have traveled with the Ramirezes for free.
“We need a name for you, then,” Carlos said, clapping his hands and looking around the table.
“What’s wrong with Tessa?” I asked.
Mauro shook his head. “Something more.”
“Tiny Tessa!” Luis said suddenly. He sat at the head of the table, his wheelchair pulled up to it. “How about that?”
I giggled, clapping my hand over my mouth.
“Bueno!” Lollie laughed, nodding vigorously and spreading her hands out dramatically in the air. “You will be the tiny trapeze girl who glitters like a perfect diamond in the air, a gem in the center of our act.”
I looked at all of them. “Thank you,” was all I could manage, and I looked down at my coffee.
Luis leaned toward me. “You are going to be magnificent,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
I looked up at Luis, and at Mauro’s sweet face and Lollie’s open one, the pride beaming through it, and was almost heartbroken. It was too much, all of this—how could I trust any of it? I had thought that Mary had loved me once, too.
Mrs. Ramirez and Victoria worked on my costume for a week straight. They sat in the main den downstairs with a bowl of rhinestones set on the table between them. They sewed each one onto the soft white fabric by hand, then stuck me through with pins in the evenings as they molded the fabric to my skin.
“More rhinestones!” Mrs. Ramirez cried, then plucked the fabric off my body and got back to work.
At night I would go look at my costume, pure white and sparkling in the moonlight, like snow and ice and frost, and I’d close my eyes and think of the spinning girl in my vision.