Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [95]
Then, in one swooping motion, I slid down the rope and to the floor. Standing in the sawdust, I smiled and bowed a final time before running behind the curtain. “And that was the magnificent Tiny Tessa in her Velasquez Circus debut!” I heard the ringmaster call.
“Tessa!” They all swarmed me at once, hugging me and knocking rhinestones from my leotard to the ground. Paulo and Lollie whooped around me, while Mauro slipped his hand through mine and beamed. Carlos bolted toward me and threw me up into the air. I felt myself laughing and laughing, but it seemed like it was all happening to someone else.
“Do you hear them?” Lollie asked. “Do you hear the crowd?”
“They love you,” Paulo breathed. “It’s amazing, like you have no weight up there.”
The crowd did not stop. “Go back and bow, Tessa,” Lollie said.
I took a deep breath and ran to the center of the ring. The light hit my skin and reflected off it. I felt like a sliver of glass held up to the sun.
That was when it broke open for me, and the dreamy world I had inhabited until then became shocking, loud. I stared out at the faces in the audience, and I could see them—men and women and children with faces lit up by joy, clapping and whistling and calling my name.
That night we celebrated for hours. Everyone whirled around me with congratulations and kisses. Everyone wanted to shake my hand or lift me up and twirl me in the air. I could barely keep any of it straight. At one point Mr. Velasquez came over and said simply, “Good job.” When he left, Carlos leaned over to me, grinning so wide I thought his face might break. “That’s as good as it gets, chica,” he said. “Enjoy it. Drink it all in.”
Paulo lit a huge bonfire out by the train cars. One of the concession girls mixed a vat of pink lemonade with rum and started serving it in ice-filled plastic glasses. There was music all around us. The band moved outside the moment that the crowds left the big top and started spilling out of the lot and back to their cars and tents. Mauro never left my side; I looked up at him, woozy, and his face was lit up as if an explosion had been set off.
“This is just like the night Mary performed with us for the first time,” Lollie said at one point. “When everything was about to change.” She looked at me, drunk and happy. “I knew you were something special, chica, the first time I saw you.”
I burrowed my face into Mauro’s neck and sighed. My muscles were heavy, and my head spun with rum. When the fire finally went down and, one by one, we all drifted off to our cars or tents, Mauro actually had to carry me off to bed.
Later, as I fell into an exhausted sleep, I dreamt of Mary, and my mother and father and brothers and Geraldine sitting in the shadows below me. The lights flashed from my body over theirs, and I swooped and arced and flew. I dreamt that they all watched me the way the audience had, with faces caught up in the fantasy and glamour, the new worlds I spun in the air.
I woke to the sound of someone banging on the compartment door. I turned over and pulled a pillow over my face. The early-morning sun streamed in through the open curtains.
“Tessa!” I heard, and more banging.
A minute later Lollie pounced on the bed next to me. Before I could even protest, she snatched the covers away and thrust a paper in my face.
I blinked my eyes open and saw it: a photo of me from the night before, in mid-swing-over, right on the front page of the town newspaper.
“What?” I sat up straight, grabbed the paper and read about my “glowing face and tiny body,” my “endless rotations that left the crowd speechless and stunned.”
“Geraldo picked it up in town,” Lollie said. “I don’t know what he was