Rain Village (10 page)

I did, and gently, she told me to unclasp my hands. “I’ve got you,” she whispered. I let go then and let my body fall back. She stood next to me and under me, making sure I wouldn’t fall. I stretched my body backward and waved my arms out.

“Like this?”

She hunched under me, her hands stretching toward me, hovering just under my skin. “How does that feel?”

“Nice,” I said. I couldn’t articulate the way my limbs felt loose and soft, my body completely without barriers, fluid as water. I don’t know that I’d ever been happier than I was right then.

“You are so lucky you have that body, Tessa,” she said, as I rocked back and forth. “It took me weeks to do that. You’re a natural.”

It was so easy: I learned the gazelle, where the left leg is straight, the
right leg bent up to the front of the right rope, the rest of the body hanging underneath. I learned the toe hang and single toe hang, where you drop from the bar from just one foot.

“What about you?” I asked one afternoon. “Don’t you want to take up the trapeze again?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Tessa,” she said.

“Just once?” I asked. “I want to see!”

“After watching you, I think I never should have bothered at all!” she said. “I was all wrong for it, you know. All wrong for lots of things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, and for a moment it seemed like her hair had gotten curlier and her eyes more blue. Like something was pressing down on her. Then she looked up at me and smiled. To my surprise, she bent down and dipped her hands in the chalk.

“Okay,” she said, her face open and suddenly radiant. “What the hell?” And with one quick movement she hurled herself to the bar and flipped up on it until she was sitting, swinging back and forth, her legs crossed beneath her and hands gripping the ropes. Her face glowed as she began swinging faster, back and forth, and then pulled herself up to her feet in one graceful movement. In the next second she lifted her feet from the bar and threw them over her head, curving her body into a scythe. She held the position for several seconds, grasping the ropes, swinging back and forth, then slipped back down until her feet rested on the bar. She was ecstatic, whooping and laughing.

The next second, without warning, she dropped her whole body down until she was hanging by her ankles and her hands were nearly sweeping across the floor. Before I could even react, she flipped back up and hung from her hands, twisting her body again so that her waist pressed against the bar, her palms leaning down into it. She kept going, in a whirl of movement: jacking her legs up and to the sides, tossing
herself over and under the bar, and then, finally, tossing herself off the bar and landing with a tiny flip and flourish.

She collapsed to the ground, out of breath. I clapped my hands, elated, and then collapsed with her. When I looked up at the shelves and the books, it seemed amazing that we were still there, in Mercy Library. For a few minutes I had been utterly transported, outside time and space.

“I’m going to be dying tomorrow,” she said, between gulps of air.

She turned her head toward me. I had never seen her more beautiful.

I became obsessed with the trapeze. Over the next year I practiced whenever I could, with Mary and alone, staying past when the library closed, past when Mary slipped out into the night to meet various lovers or just to be alone with her thoughts, and her demons. Mary agreed to keep the bar suspended from the beams and even rigged a tiny hook to keep it pulled back and out of the way of library customers.

I practiced so hard that my muscles ached and I felt myself solidifying into a hard mass. My hands cracked and bled from twisting over the bar; sometimes I hobbled to the library in the morning—through the dead leaves, and snow, and spring foliage—unable to move my arms or bend my knees, my head still clouded from the dreamless sleep of the night before. I was like a raw wound but as solid as granite, the most substantial I had ever been in my life.

As time passed, my body changed in other ways, too, as if my body’s changing and Mary’s coming into my life were intimately connected. She influenced me in so many ways, anyway: I also began to carry around the scent of cinnamon and cloves, trailing it behind me and letting it wrap around me when I stood still; I began piling books on the library’s front desk, running my fingers across their spines as if they were cats; I lined
my arms with bracelets, bracelets I was constantly picking off the ground as they slid off; I grew my hair, too, letting it swarm from my head and past my shoulders. Though my hair was straight and thin, I let months pass without brushing it so that, like Mary, I could claim tangles and knots and ruin my hair with combs whenever the occasion arose. Of course I would never really be like Mary. And I was never beautiful like her until I was in the air.

Maybe it was the way I took Mary into me that made my father look at me in a new light. One day when I was about fourteen, I was walking through the house absentmindedly, dreaming of the Velasquez Circus, when I felt the strangest prickling on my skin. It was like the moment when Mary Finn had sought me out in front of the courthouse, except that now I felt no dizzying excitement of love like I’d experienced then, only the uneasy and dismal sense that I’d been found out.

The living room was the same as always. I looked at the thin burlap sofa so uncomfortable that no one was ever found stretched out upon it, at the bowls of plastic oranges and pears decorating the windowsills, at the splintering, sagging floor, and, finally, at the rocking chair that moved back and forth like a little minnow. That was when I realized the chair was filled with two eyes as big as suns, crackling into my skin and down my flat body. That was when I saw my father, whose gaze pinned me to the spot, trapping me in that little burlapped room my mother had designed to the discomfort of us all. There was nothing natural about it: nothing natural about that house and my being there, and nothing natural about the way my father looked at me from that rocking chair not meant for his body or anyone else’s.

I might have thought I’d dreamt it or been carried away by all the crazy novels Mary had me read. I might have forgotten that sensation of shame rushing through me like blood. But that night my father appeared in my bedroom doorway, blocking out the light behind him. I stared at
him, tried to figure out what he was doing, but I couldn’t make out his eyes in the mass of his body. The whole room was cast into shadows, and my father’s silhouette showed up jagged on my wall, like teeth.

“Father?” I whispered. For a moment I wondered if it was someone else, a stranger who’d broken into our house and come for me. I felt fear slide through my body in a cold rush. He was so large, looming there, much larger than he had appeared in the confines of the rocking chair.

“Who is it?” I breathed, my heart pounding. I looked to the bed across the room, but I could tell from the sounds of Geraldine’s snoring that she was fast asleep.

“Shhhh,” he said. Even with that hushed tone, I knew who it was, yet I had never heard such a soft, gentle sound come from his mouth. A sound that seared over my skin.

“Here, Tessa,” he whispered, reaching out his hand. “Mind your sister. See you don’t wake her.” I could have sworn he was smiling, but even as my eyes adjusted to the light I could not make out his features.

I dared not say no to him. I shook as I pushed back the covers and threw my legs over the bed, toward the floor. The wood was cold under my bare feet as I stepped down, and I stopped and pulled my arms around my shoulders. I could not stop shaking.

“Do as I say, girl,” he said, still reaching his hand toward me.

I walked in slow steps across the floor, my arms wrapped around me. He snatched my wrist in his palm as I approached. I glanced back—the room seemed strange, covered in shadow and dark. Geraldine was spread out on her mattress. Breathing slowly in and out.

I followed him down the creaking stairway, through the front hall, back through the kitchen. He held the screen door open for me and then I was outside, stumbling over grass and crops, dirt crunching under my feet. We did not speak. I barely even breathed as I walked on tiptoes behind him, and my mind raced with all the things I must have done
wrong to make him come for me at night like this, without even waking Geraldine.

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the cornfield. The corn swished on both sides of us. He pushed me down onto the dirt with the corn swaying, hovering over me. The moon was out that night, I remember. The corn stretched in front of it like claws.

I closed my eyes and braced myself for his hands against my skin. When they came they were gentle, slow. I popped open my eyes, astonished. Wasn’t he going to hit me? Hadn’t I done something wrong?

“Quiet, girl,” he said, and I shuddered at the sound of his voice—so soothing, like he was talking to a cat. He crouched over me then and pulled up my cotton nightgown, yanked it over my head and pressed me down again until the dirt cut into my back, into bare skin. He spread me out under him, and his eyes moved over me, mocking.

“You’re a strange one all right,” he said, laughing, and then slid his hand across my breast. “Barely even a girl.”

I stared at the moon over his shoulder. The corn silhouetted against it.

Tears rushed down my face and I whispered “I’m sorry” again and again. I shivered in the dirt, expecting his hands to beat down any second. I tried to cover my bare skin.

He came down on me then, so heavy I could barely breathe. My skin scraped over dirt. Pain ripped and seared through the center of my body, through places I didn’t even know could feel. I kept my eyes squeezed shut. The smell of earth and growing things was as strong as if I’d been buried in it. I closed down, didn’t even flinch after a while, but my mind raced and flickered and the whole world seemed to be contained inside it. After a moment I imagined I could even see the girl being worked over out there in the dirt, under the corn, but I was so far away I didn’t even care. I kept my eyes shut and my mind zeroed in, focused on the trapeze,
the feel of the bar in my palm. Air swept under me, split open on all sides. I felt myself soaring over everything then. The pain that ripped up through me, opening inside me like an obscene flower, was happening to some other girl’s body, somewhere else.

Afterward he picked me up like I was some sort of wounded bird and carried me inside. I kept my eyes shut as he washed the blood from my legs with a cloth from the kitchen sink. After carrying me back up the stairs, he laid me on my bed as smoothly as a dress you planned on wearing to church the next day. Geraldine stirred slightly but did not wake. When I finally heard the door shut behind him, I turned on my side and wept.

The next day I woke up feeling as if my insides had been scooped out and replaced with fire. Every part of my body hurt as I moved from side to side. I stayed in bed. I wrapped my hips in towels and paper to soak up the blood, and hid the soiled sheets underneath the mattress.

I thought of the library: Mary unlocking the thick wood doors, the line of people that would surely be waiting by now. It felt like a parallel life I had been dreaming about but had never actually led.

“What the hell are you still doing in bed?” Geraldine asked, glaring at me.

I closed my eyes and ignored her, and soon my mother was in the room, already covered in dirt and exasperated to have been called away from it.

“What is going on here, Tessa Riley?” my mother asked. “I will not have you jeopardizing that job.”

“I’m sick,” I said, looking at her dully.

“Goddamnit.” She shifted angrily, then caught sight of something, a dash of blood on the sheet. Her face became softer, almost the way it
had been once, back when she loved me and thought I’d keep growing, back when she still tucked me in at night. Something inside me almost caved in right then.

“Well, well, you’ve become a woman,” she said. “A miracle.”

I looked at her then, and the feeling I’d had a moment before, that pinprick of longing, disappeared. Suddenly I ached for Mary so much it was a physical pain inside me. I wished I could will her to my side, wished I could ask her to explain the world to me. I winced, and shame seeped into every cell of my body at the thought of her knowing what had happened to me.

I stared at the ceiling. Later, when Geraldine perched herself on the side of my bed and made snorting noises to annoy me, I closed my eyes and imagined myself a million miles away, in Rain Village, with the rain pounding down over me and leaves sticking to my skin.

The next day I felt better but couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed and go back to work. I didn’t know how I would face anyone, let alone Mary. I was cheap, disgusting, like some old discarded thing. The power I had felt in my body up on the trapeze, practicing twirls and layouts, felt like some lie I had been told. My father had burrowed into me and brought out the truth: that I, Tessa Riley, was a freak, something monstrous. The kids in the square had known.
He
had known.

At my mother’s insistence, I went down for dinner that second night. My father behaved as if everything were normal. If it weren’t for the sharp ache in the center of my body, the image of the corn bent in front of the moon, haunting me, I might have thought that I’d imagined everything.

The phone rang, and I almost jumped out of my chair. We all looked to my father. The phone never rang in our house and was only there for the direst emergencies.

“Lucas?” my mother asked, her voice tentative, almost meek.

He continued eating, wordlessly. We sat there, and the air in the room grew heavy with his silence. The phone continued to ring.

“Leave it,” he said, after nearly a full minute had passed.

The next morning I pretended to leave for work and instead wandered through the countryside, climbing trees and spreading myself out in the fields. Alone, I could just go blank and dull, stare at the clouds until I felt like I was one, too, but even the sight of another human being—a farmer, from a distance—made me want to sob. I could not face anyone. All I could do was stare at the clouds and the sun and dream of flying.