Rain Village (34 page)

My heart ached for him. “I just can’t,” I whispered. “It’s always there. So many unanswered questions.”

“What if the answers just make you more unhappy?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What if it doesn’t change anything?” he asked, taking my hands in mine.

“Then I will come back,” I said. “And we’ll be happy again.”

He got very quiet then, still. “And what if you don’t?”

I looked up at him and felt like my heart was breaking. I started sobbing, big wracking sobs, and I doubled over, the pain was so intense. Mauro leaned in and gathered me up, wrapped me in his warm body.

I thought of our first date in Mexico City, of our wedding. He carried me over to the bed then and stayed pressed against me, shushing and lulling me to sleep. “I do not understand this, Tessita,” he said. “Why you cannot leave the past behind you. Why you can’t understand that this is your life now, that the past just brought you here.”

When I woke up a few hours later, Mauro was gone. The room seemed eerily silent, the sun much too bright flowing in. It all came back to me. The night before. Costas, Mary. Rain Village. I turned on my side, and my head throbbed with pain. Slowly the sounds of the circus drifted in—the laughter and voices, the roars of the tigers, the tinkling music and popping of the sideshow games.

The door pushed open then, and I sat up, immediately self-conscious. Mauro walked in carrying a cup of coffee and bowl of fruit. I was so relieved I jumped out of bed and ran to him.

“Oh, Tessita,” he said, setting the tray on the edge of the bed and pulling me into him. “No more tears.” He sat down and I leaned into his side. “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

I clung to him, holding him as tightly as I could. “Please understand,” I said, talking into his ear, his hair. “Please forgive me. I will come back to you.”

His body was stiff, but he relaxed it then, held me tight in his arms and pressed his face to my neck. “Then go,” he whispered. I could feel wetness on my neck. “The
gitano
is leaving tomorrow. You have much to do.”

He pulled back, and I stared into his black eyes, the curving lashes. “Just come back to me,” he said. “Don’t lose your heart.”

“Thank you,” I said. My whole body was trembling.

“I will not stay and watch you go with him,” he said, stroking my face and hair. “Do not ask it of me. I’m going to stay in town for a day while you pack up. If you change your mind and are still here, I will be the happiest man in the world.”

“I will be faithful to you,” I said. “I will come back.”

He leaned down and kissed me, his lips as soft as pillows. “Good luck to you,
mi amor,
” he said. I watched him stand up and turn to the door. So proud, a star of the circus. He slipped out into the day, leaving me alone.

I spent the next several hours wrapped in the sheets, crying, wishing I could stop time. Over and over I wondered if I could let Costas go and keep my life the way it had been before, but his presence and Mary’s story had burrowed into me, illuminated every missing part. Everything had changed. It was early afternoon by the time I forced myself out of bed. Mauro was right: I had a lot to do.

After I dressed and bathed, I went to the tents to find Costas, trying to avoid the curious faces turning to me as I went by.

“I’m coming with you,” I said, as soon as I came upon him. I saw the relief in his face, but before he could say anything, I turned away.

I spent the rest of the day doing chores. I gathered my things and set my wages and contract in order. After listening to him plead and bribe and shout for most of the afternoon, I worked out a settlement with Mr. Velasquez for all my future missed shows, and then I cleaned out the train car and packed one large duffel bag. I had accumulated a chunk of money over the years, and I gathered as much of it as I could and sewed it into my pockets. I knew I was taking far more than I would need for a short journey, but I didn’t think about what that meant.

When I told Lollie I was leaving, she promised to keep my costumes safe, along with whatever else I could not carry with me.

“I knew this day was coming,” she said. “Just be quick,
chica.
And come back. Don’t mistake her past for your own future.”

“Why, Tessa?” Paulo asked, when I told him. “Aren’t you happy here?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am. But I just know this is something I have to do.”

He shook his head and walked away.

That night, the night before Costas and I left together for Rain Village, I spread glitter over my cheeks for the last time, staring into the mirror at the woman I’d become. I had to reapply my eye makeup several times to fill in the paths of my tears. I stuck my feet in my sparkling slippers, draped a cloak over my rhinestone-covered leotard, and set out for the ring.

The circus makes everything beautiful, transforms any pain. As I twirled over the crowd, I just let the air hold me, make me into someone new. Even the tears that fell down my face sparkled like diamonds under the light.

Afterward we walked silently from the big top to the backyard. No one was smiling or laughing the way they usually did. Carlos, furious, wouldn’t even look at me. The dark, silent mood seemed in direct contrast to the whirling lights and music and shouting coming from the midway and front lot. When I returned to the empty train car, I took off my costume with shaking hands and carefully folded it into my open bag. I reached into the pile of clothes and pulled out my pink lace skirt. Taking a breath, I split open the hem, let Mary’s opal ring spill onto the table. The swirling colors lit up the room, and dazzled me. Suddenly I was so sad I could barely see straight. I slipped the opal onto my right ring finger and held up both of my hands to the light: everything I loved and wanted in the world seemed reduced to those two blinding spots on my hand. My wedding ring, and the ring Mary had fastened to a chain around her neck before she walked into the river.

Costas and I set out into the early morning. The ground seemed empty and stunned under the hot sun; my body felt thick above the concrete and sidewalks. We walked into town, and I felt unmoored, like I was exchanging one self for another. I imagined Mauro alone in a hotel room, preparing to head back to our empty train car.

“How do you feel?” Costas asked, turning to me.

His voice caught me off guard. I turned to him, surprised. I looked up at him, then flicked my eyes quickly away. “Terrible,” I whispered. “Heartbroken.”

“Are you sure you want to come?”

I nodded. “I need to do this,” I said. There was no question: Rain Village might as well have been my destiny, my pull to it was so strong.

We bought our tickets and boarded a northwest-bound train an hour later. Over the course of the day we watched the land go from dry and dusty to green and lush. I had so many questions, but my head was muddled. I kept imagining Mauro getting ready for the evening show, moving across the wire as if he were walking on air. I couldn’t pin down what I was feeling: heartbroken, yet detached somehow, as if the only thing real was the clanking and rumbling of the train beneath us. I closed my eyes, let the steady clang of the wheels soothe me to sleep.

The next morning Costas’s face was the first thing I saw. It jolted me into the present. I turned to the window; flowers began coating the fields the train passed through, and a light breeze whipped through the train car, fluttering through my hair and clothing. We rode silently. It made no sense, but I
knew
him. Our longing and sadness formed a bridge between us. In my years with the circus I’d been surrounded by huge, heaping families sprawling across the lot, families who passed their gifts from one generation to the next. Costas knew what it was to feel adrift and alone in the world, no matter what places you found, from time to time, to rest in.

We stayed on the train for two days. We slept sitting up in our seats, our bags propped on the seat next to us. When I woke that second morning and saw his face right there next to mine, I thought for a fierce, crazy moment that I was back in Mercy Library, the sun slanting in through the windows as Mary and I sat by the front desk, stamping people’s books and drinking herb tea. I felt a deep, sudden sense of being past pain. As I focused in on Costas’s face, his beauty, his eyes, there was sadness and guilt and love and desire all at once. It was intoxicating, strange. The past raging back to life.
What am I doing?
I thought, again and again. But Rain Village lived inside me, moving me toward itself like some undertow pulling me out to sea.

I sat back and stared at the changing landscape, the giant trees and the distant sparkling snow, and thought how everything before this moment seemed like something I’d dreamt. I thought of Mary, how she had left the circus, too, for reasons I’d never understood. Did she feel this same way, anchorless and suspended? Did everyone feel it who left one place for another? I thought of the glitter-covered girl on the trapeze, dangling from a rope, spinning like a windmill in the air while the audience counted each turn and waited for her to fall. I thought of my father carving our hedges
into the shapes of animals while Geraldine and I watched from the porch. I thought of being hunched over a sewing machine in Kansas City, and the only thing that seemed real was the glass pane in front of me, the faint smudge blocking my view of the passing towns. I pressed my hand against the glass and stared at the starfish-shaped imprint it left.

“What was she like?” Costas asked, late that night. I blinked my eyes open and turned to him, saw the pale green of his eyes in the dark. “You call her name in your sleep; did you know that?”

“No,” I whispered. I wondered if I always had, if Mauro had simply never told me. Costas smiled encouragingly. “Describe her,” he said.

I looked at him for a moment and then thought back on all those moments, every single moment I had spent with her. With Costas there next to me, I felt safe. I thought of her rasping voice, her laughter as she swung through the air above me or steadied me with her strong, ring-covered hands.

“She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” I said. “Around her everything was different. Everything.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. I was grateful that I could talk to him about Mary without my heart splitting in two. With Costas my life seemed so rich, so bound up in myth. Mauro had Mexico and his raging history, this wonderful larger-than-life family he had taken me into. I had Mary and the river, her hair coiled wetly around her neck. Whispers and secrets, like Costas had.

“She came in and wrapped everything in mystery. It was like one of the piñatas the circus kids have on their birthdays. The way the world turns over, is almost too much to bear when all those toys and coins and candies come raining down.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at me. “I know what you mean.”

I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to spread myself bare, everything that was wounded and scarred and ugly. Things with Mauro were so
pure and soft, soothing. Mauro healed and protected me, made me forget the past, sink into the present. I worried that I had failed Mauro, that I was failing him now. I thought of Mary then, and suddenly I felt in my blood how utterly I had failed her. I had shut myself away, let myself drift away from her until there was barely anything there. I hadn’t even shared the swing-over trick with her. I had left her alone in that library, to her demons.

“Well,” I said, breathing in. “When she died, I felt like everything she’d given me was gone. As if
she
had taken it all away from me. I never even thought about why she did it; I just knew that the one person I had, my one friend, had left me. And everything else back then, it was so miserable. All the time. Even talking about it now I just feel blackness.”

“What was wrong?” he asked. “What was so bad?”

My father’s face loomed down, the memory of his callused farmer’s hands flipping me over, rubbing into me, opening me up. Me washing and washing and washing in the river water, when it was through. Closing down until I could barely see the world around me. I thought of Mary. Back then I’d been so dazzled by her; I always should have seen her better than I did.

“My father hurt me,” I said. Tears broke over my face, and tore me up from the inside. “From when I was twelve till the time I left home.”

I could feel the words hanging there before me, as if they could push every molecule of air out of the car. When a long moment of silence had passed, I looked up at him. I could almost imagine I was setting things right, saying now what should have been said before.

“Did she know?” he asked.

I was disoriented, could barely breathe. “Who?”

“Mary. Did she know?”

I was about to shake my head when I remembered her face.
You can always leave,
she had said, again and again.
There are always more selves inside you that just need to come out.
She must have known, I thought. She must have felt all that grief and shame; I must have worn it on me like a
banner. I remembered running to her covered in bruises, the day she finally set up the trapeze for me and gave me my first lesson, though she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t ever wanted to face the past, I thought. She had always turned everything into stories.

“Her father, too,” Costas said, interrupting my thoughts.

“What?”

“Her father. Katerina said that their father molested them, too. First her and then Mary. That is what my father told me. He said that Kate-rina was the woman of his dreams but that she was all twisted up and broken inside. Always running from Rain Village and longing for it at the same time, to set things right.”

A strange sense of vertigo swept through me, and I clutched my head, squeezed my eyes shut. For a moment I felt like I was that girl again, sitting in front of the courthouse, wearing my father’s hands like a brand on my skin. I was innocent then, but it must have been there the whole time. That mark.

Suddenly it was impossible to pretend the past was something separate from what I was. Costas brought something with him that cut through the power of the circus, made me suspicious of the way it transformed pain. Made me suspicious of the stories Mary told, of the lights and the spangles and the glitter, the Ferris wheel going round and round. Made me suspicious, I realized then, of Mauro, too.