Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (11 page)

Still, it was that kind of thing that bothered me. I pictured that man, slowly suffocating in that dirt, and just couldn’t live with the fact that I’d done it. Didn’t matter that he’d touched Sherri Lynn wrong. Didn’t matter that he hit his wife and called her names you wouldn’t call a dog.

I couldn’t pull him back out of the ground; once he was gone, he was gone. I tried, but couldn’t budge him. Once a thing vanished, it was gone to me. Someone else could come upon him. He could be a found thing then, but to me he was a lost thing. Vanished. Except the quarters, I reminded myself. I was getting better. Maybe in time, things wouldn’t have to be so lost.

“Rabi,” the little girl said after the show. She slipped her long fingers into mine and handed me a stone. She had picked it from beneath the bleachers; I could feel the very depression it had made in the ground. Shallow and as cool as the night air.

In her mind, she showed me where she wanted the rock to go. The desert plain was lit by only starlight; the brush and cactus made strange shadows over the ground. In the ground, buried beneath rock and mud, was a piece of a lost thing. Metallic and not something I could fully understand. I tried to, but I felt the same murk I did when I tried to look into the little girl. She was giving me this, allowing me to see, but I couldn’t understand.

The rock vanished from my palm and the breath went out of her. It was like wind moving through trees, that soft whooshing sound the leaves make. She made this sound, her hand relaxed in mine, and we continued on toward my train car, without another word spoken between us.

Come morning, Jackson was more excited than I’d seen him in days. He interrupted everyone’s practice and called us all to the main tent. Pasha Doshenko stayed on her trapeze, swaying above us as Jackson talked.

“It’s a good deal,” he kept saying while he rubbed his hands together and paced before the crowd of us. It’s like he was trying to convince us, something he’d never done. He’d always told us where we were going and those who wanted to follow did. A few had been lost along the way, but what better show was there than Jackson and his unreal circus and marmalade?

“There’s a man, you see,” he said and I did see, a round man with round glasses and thick hands, and this man offered Jackson more money than he’d ever been offered for a performance. “Food and real shelters included,” Jackson continued and I saw in his mind a hotel with a swimming pool and everything. I saw warm baths and soft beds. “We’d stay for the winter, till things get warm again.”

That part of the deal was important, I realized, and I felt the pain in Jackson’s hands as though it was my own. He was young, but his bones had already started to rub together, causing him pain no matter how he moved. Jackson wanted to bed down somewhere warm for a few weeks and move on when spring came.

“Dallas,” he finally said. Which was backwards from where we were going. It would delay San Francisco, he said and I got a flash of a beautiful young girl in his mind. Not his lover, but his mother as he remembered her from his childhood. Jackson wanted to get home, wanted it badly, but didn’t know if he could stand the winter ride to get there.

This was agreeable for the little girl who began to purr against my side. I’d forgotten she was there, but traveling east was fine with her and when Jackson took his vote, her long pale arm was one of the first to rise.

Didn’t matter to me where we went, really, but Dallas was a little too close for my comfort. Close to Sherri Lynn, close to the little house that had been ours. She was still there; she wouldn’t leave her roses nor her turtles for anything in the world. She liked her teaching, liked being far from her family.

“Limbo,” the little girl whispered and I wondered then if my mind were clear to her like Sherri Lynn’s had been to me. “Goin’ east, goin’ east.” She couldn’t contain her excitement.

“What is it you want me to make vanish?” I asked, wanting this over. Once I did the trick, she would go. Wouldn’t she?

But she shook her head and her pale hair rubbed her shoulders and then my coat as she nuzzled up to me. I froze under her touch. I didn’t need this, didn’t need her telling me I was in limbo. I wasn’t. I’d moved on with my life, did what was best for me and Sherri Lynn both.

The little girl didn’t answer, and I found out later that night that Gemma, now as dark as Sombra, and Sombra, now as light as Gemma, had named her Vara. Vara curled herself up at my grate once more and slept through the show, while I danced and performed until exhaustion claimed me and I made a man’s vanished coin appear in a woman’s all-too visible cleavage. He chuckled, she shrieked, but the play went on.

The train moved at a steady pace through the New Mexico desert. It was strange to see snow across cactus and scrub brush, over the red and taupe earth, but there it was and it looked pretty.

Vara didn’t move from the small window much. She stayed huddled in the blanket and her breath made small puffs of fog on the pane. Every now and then she pressed her fingers against the glass, as if trying to measure distance. Once, she got excited about a landmark, but we passed it and she realized it wasn’t the mountain she’d been thinking about.

She started wailing the next day, as the train drew closer to the state line. She woke me with her crying and there was nothing I could do to calm her. Her cries rose until the window shattered and the train ground to a sudden halt. Froze up on the tracks, as though it was caught in ice. Vara wrenched herself from my arms, scrambled out of the car, and across the frozen desert.

I watched her go, the tail of her shift flipping up and down like an antelope tail. She’d refused all offer of other clothing; didn’t want anything that made her look human, she told Gemma. There was no danger of that, I thought, but kept my opinion to myself. She was too small and too pale to be human, but running away . . . she had that down pat.

With the train stuck on the tracks, we weren’t going anywhere for a while. Jackson’s hot cursing should have melted the frozen wheels, but they remained wedged against the track, unmoving.

Gemma, back to her stardust self, shoved me and I stumbled into the brush. “Go after her,” she demanded, and Gemma never demanded. Those hands coaxed and that voice tempted, but now they demanded and I went, following the trail Vara had left in the snow.

It was a wide trail, clumsy and crooked. Her feet must be frozen, I thought, but told myself they weren’t human feet at all and maybe she didn’t even feel the cold. The cloudy sky above me began to darken, though it couldn’t be much past mid-day. My own feet were cold, legs stiff, and I didn’t want to go much further.

Vara was sprawled on the ground ahead of me, one hand stretching toward the eastern horizon. I touched my hand to her back and found her like a block of ice. No matter that she wasn’t human, she was cold and I picked her up and cuddled her into my coat. She was passive against me, maybe too cold to react, but when I turned away and headed back toward the train, she whimpered.

In my mind I saw a picture of what “east” meant to her, and I fell to my knees. They cracked against stone, but I couldn’t feel any pain as I went down. Could only see and feel what Vara showed me then and there.

The metal was curved, the smooth edge of a ship meant for the stars. Her ship once upon a time, but now it was broken, most of it carried away. She couldn’t get home, couldn’t find her people, but wanted to get back to that one remaining piece of ship. And if she couldn’t get there, she wanted to disappear.

It would be easy, I found myself thinking. Easy to make her vanish, into that bit of ground, nestled against the metal of her ship. But no, no, God I just wouldn’t do it. She was living and breathing and I wouldn’t end that.

She felt my refusal, but was too cold and weak to move away from me. She pushed against my chest, made me feel all that she was missing—the touch of her mother’s hand, the nuzzle of her lover, the familiar dirt of her homeworld—but still I refused.

Vara reached up and grabbed a handful of my hair. She yanked, tried to make me feel pain, any pain that would equal her own, but she couldn’t and that only made hers more keen. She touched me again, this time deeper, and unlocked my own pain. Made me touch Sherri Lynn and the desolation she had known after I vanished. I had closed that off long ago, but Vara opened it as easy as she might a door.

Left that morning and didn’t tell Sherri Lynn, couldn’t tell her, and she woke alone in the bed. My things were neat in the closets and drawers, but I was gone. Gone like the fairies came and took me in the night.

Sherri Lynn was broken, like Vara’s ship. Submerged in cold ground, buried so no one could find her. She was dying there, cold and alone, and here I was, playing in the circus without a care in the world. Accepting Beth’s warm smile, finding comfort in Gemma and Sombra’s bed. Taking time with ladies like Anne who came to visit and wanted something to vanish in exchange for a little roll and tumble. Pretending Sherri Lynn didn’t exist.

It was easier than going back, but going back we were and if I wouldn’t press Vara into her ground, she would press me into mine.

When Vara was ready to go, she released the train from its slumber. The wheels slowly turned and steam rolled back over the cars. Merrily we roll along, Jackson whispered and refused to look at Vara.

“Shouldn’t have ever stopped for her,” he said.

“She’d be dead then.”

“Blown to bits like that cow,” Jackson agreed and I knew he meant it.

The cow had been a spectacular thing, standing there one minute, flying in a thousand pieces the next. The train only slowed briefly. I could have moved it before we hit. But I hadn’t. Why? Sometimes the simplest answers are the truth. I didn’t want to. I wanted to see what happened. That was why any of us did anything. Just wanted to see what happened.

Making the cow disappear was easy, moving it just off the tracks to the lazy stretch of grass beyond. It would chew grass for a few more years, but it was stupid and would wander onto the tracks again sooner or later.

To Jackson, Vara was a stupid thing. A thing that would wander onto another track sooner or later.

She didn’t move when I laid her down on the mattress. Her knees were still drawn to her chest. I covered her with the blanket and watched her, and wondered if I was wrong.

“You could find a life here,” I finally said. “It could be a good one.”

She roused at that. Sat up and turned toward me, stretching toes toward the fire I’d made. Vara shook her head. “I don’t want to be something unreal, something people pay money to see. I just want to go home. And can’t.”

She picked up the thing nearest her hand, a discarded shoe, and threw it at me. I was so startled I didn’t react and the shoe hit me in my chest. It fell to the floor as she yelled at me.

“And you can. Your home is there and you don’t go.”

“My home is here.”

“This is no home.” She pounded the mattress and gestured around her. There was little here that would make this a home; the room itself never existed in one place for more than a few nights. There was no yard, no flowers, no real bed with sheets and pillows. No photographs on the wall and no mail in a mailbox. No Sherri Lynn.

“I had to come here,” I said as I reached for the shoe Vara had thrown. I picked it up, held it in my hands, used it as a focal point. Anything so I wouldn’t have to look into Vara’s eyes. “I did it to a man once, made him vanish, and it’s too easy to do it again. I can’t do it again, I won’t. Not even for the best of reasons, don’t you see?”

I think she did see, because she turned away from me. I dropped the shoe and crouched behind her, wrapped my arms around her small shoulders and pressed a hand over her heart. Or whatever it was that fluttered inside of her like a caught fish.

“Right here and now you are alive. It don’t matter that you’re different. It don’t matter where you came from. No one is goin’ to care about those things.”

“But I care.” Her voice was small, so small I could have held it in my palm and had room for a bird, a shoe, and maybe a jar of marmalade. “I am those things. And you, you have this wonderful gift and all you do is make coins roll down women’s dresses. You could help me—I’ve shown you the place.”

There would be no arguing. I’d known that all along.

“Then let’s go, you and me. Let’s go now.” She turned in my arms and her eyes brightened. Her watery fingers squeezed my arms. She was ready now. She had nothing to pack.

And neither did I really, so when the train stopped for the night, we stole into the car of horses and took One Eye, who Jackson was always threatening to shoot. Grabbed some rolls and marmalade, and vanished into the night.

We weren’t alone right away; Sombra and Gemma followed us, in shadows and bits of starlight, but they didn’t talk so we didn’t acknowledge them. When eventually they left us, the air grew cool and damp. Vara looked back, as though she felt them go.

We rode that whole long night through and through the next day; we stopped only long enough to eat. Vara was too excited about getting to the place she’d shown me in her mind. Her mind was more clear now, she was showing me more things. Things I didn’t really want to see, but couldn’t help but noticing.

She had one thing on her world that she missed as much as she missed familiar faces. Smashed berries was all she could think to call it in her head. Like the marmalade, I thought as her pale finger slid into the jar to scrape the final sweet bits from the bottom.

Next twilight brought us to the place Vara had shown me in her mind. It wasn’t a pretty place, barren and deeply scarred. Vara slipped out of my loose hold and ran across the snowy ground, light as a fleck of lint. She went over a small ridge and I rode One Eye down after her.

Vara kneeled in the dirt, took up handfuls of it and scrubbed it over her skin. This was the place, she’d lived here for a month before she’d found the courage to leave and look for her own kind. But there were none, only tall, dark strangers who didn’t speak her language and so she’d had to learn.

“I want to go, will you make me vanish?”