Rain Village (15 page)

What I thought about was the feeling she must have had when she felt herself slipping, when the water moved into her mouth and lungs and the water plants twisted around her legs. The way she must have given herself over to the water and felt herself sink into it, become part of it, felt her mind go blank and soft. I stood there by Mary’s desk, imagining it. How the water would feel against my own skin, curling into my mouth. How if I allowed it, if I chose it, I would never have to be without her. Never have to go back to Riley Farm. Never have to lie back in the cornfield staring at the moon, or run past the kids in the town square and hear them laughing. Never have to be the freakish, strange girl with hands shaped like starfish and as small as plums. Never have to face my own life. The river was only steps away. I wondered if Mary’s feet had left indents in the earth, for me to follow.

I let my mind wind down and stop. Concentrated on the feeling of the water, what I imagined it would be like. Let my mind let go of everything in the world but that feeling, the emptiness of being so far below the earth and air.

I focused so hard on the blackness, the silence, that I stopped smelling, hearing, feeling the faint chill against my skin. I stopped feeling
myself at all, and it was then that I saw it. A twirling, tiny shape, a speck really, in the center of all the darkness. Flicking back and forth. Getting closer and closer. Filling up my mind until all I could see was a perfect image of a body whirling around a white rope, cutting cleanly through the air. It took me a minute to realize that it was my own body I was seeing. My own body covered in sequins, stretched out in a smooth, gleaming line, moving around and around, unaffected by gravity, unaffected by anything of this earth.

I opened my eyes and realized there were tears running down my face.

I felt it, deep in my body.

“You need to make a life for yourself,” she had said.

“Far away from here,” I said out loud, finally realizing what she had meant. “In the circus.” The room seemed to spin around me. I could walk into the river, I thought, or I could live in the air. Spin in the air until I became pure light, until I transcended everything. Suddenly the desire moved through me so strongly I almost cried out, and all the muscles in my body seemed to break open, all at once. It was a strange feeling. I thought of wings lifting up and spreading in the air, expanding and unfolding and opening out, and I thought of Mary in the brochure from the Velasquez Circus, a spinning blur of light as she flew through space.

I ran through the stacks to the back of the library, my heart in my mouth, my feet storming across the wooden slats, and I pushed the stool out and leapt up on it, then reached for the trapeze. I curled my fingers around the cold metal. The moment my hands touched the bar, everything felt different. I had a place, I thought, beyond Mercy Library and Riley Farm. As I pulled myself to my feet, gripping the ropes with my hands, I knew I had made a decision.

It’s what she had wanted, I thought. What she had seen in me. What she had given to me.

It is strange, how people drop out of your life, like tears. The way the whole world can shift and change, the way you can choose to remake it. Choose to become someone new. When I left Oakley, Kansas, I was only sixteen years old, but it seemed so long in coming that I might as well have been fifty. I had never stopped longing to be a part of my family and my town, no matter what, but it was too late for that now; it was too late for a lot of things, and my heart was so chock-full of grief and love and hope and wildness that I thought I would burst with it. As I walked into the ice-cold night, under the black sky sprinkled with stars like sharp diamonds, I thought of Mary, all those years before, heading out into the world, leaving everything she’d known behind. I remembered that first time I’d left my house and taken off running for the town square, determined to find something more in the world.

I left Riley Farm with a bag flung over my shoulder filled with clothes and books, my money and Mary’s ring sewn into the hem of my skirt. I wanted to have a life separate from everything that had come before, and back then I imagined it was possible to have a life apart from Oakley and my family, as if I could slip out of my own skin like a snake. I imagined it was possible to have a life apart from Mary and what she had been to me, though I was heading toward a city she herself had
created in my mind, and I was going there to find the Velasquez Circus, which I knew came through the city every spring. I was stepping into my future, though everything I knew of the circus was wrapped in Mary’s memory and stories, the smell of spices. Before I had simply dreamt that one day I too could work under those lights, unbound by normal laws of gravity and flight. Now I knew there was nowhere else for me, in all the world.

I was not prepared for the grief that moved through me as I passed the neighboring farms, as I cut through the town square for the last time, grief that went beyond Mary Finn. I knew my sister would wake up to find my bed and closet empty, that she would feel under my mattress and find it smooth and bookless, that she would find the small postcard I’d left on her dresser, a picture of a clown I’d found with Mary’s things. I knew my father would rage through the house, that the walls would sag and strain with his anger, that Geraldine and my brothers and my mother would have to tiptoe around him for days, eat with their heads bent over their bowls, not making a sound. When I got to the edge of town and the wide, main road that led to Kansas City, I started to run, tears streaming down my face, imagining him coming after me with legs that could run whole miles for every tiny step I took in the snow.

The faster I ran, the safer I thought I’d be, as if sheer distance could separate me from him, my grief, everything of the past. I walked for days and days, from morning till night, without stopping. It was as if stopping would whirl me back to Oakley and to the cornfields and to Mary, floating in the river, her body wrapped in leaves. And so I walked and walked, letting my feet crease and freeze and blister, until one day the city appeared before me, its spiked skyline outlined above the horizon. Mary had told me all about the clanging of streetcars and the grates that cut up the roads, about the laundry hanging from lines that stretched from rooftop to rooftop, and about the smog that curled around chimneys
and the office buildings that stacked floor upon floor upon floor until you got dizzy counting them. Years before, she had followed Juan Galindo on the same roads until the icicles disappeared from the tree branches, the snow melted from the ground, and they reached the city that now glimmered with lights before me.

My heart danced in my chest as I gazed at the city; the skyline seemed like a cluster of gifts under a Christmas tree. As I walked closer, with each step the dry grass became sparser and the houses turned to buildings and then to enormous silver fingers that pointed to the sky. Men and women rushed by me dressed in formal clothes, and they would have trampled me had I not taken to moving from doorway to doorway, out of their path. The farther I went, the more the world closed down until I no longer had spaces to run and hide in. I walked until the city pressed into me so tight I couldn’t breathe.

The delicate streams that ran through Oakley, the swaying vegetables and buried potatoes, the weeping willows that fell over the river, the endless grassy fields—everything was blotted out by the city, by stark concrete and stone.

My head whirling, I stopped and sat on a set of stairs that led into a small building. I dropped my sack to my side and only then realized how tired I was, how hot and damp my face was despite the cold. A woman stepped out of the building and brushed past me, followed by a dog on a leash. I turned around and looked: it seemed unimaginable that life could exist inside buildings like this. A train whistled nearby. Cars clattered down the street. The air seemed to get chillier by the moment, as the sun fell in the sky. I couldn’t believe how a place so full could feel so empty. I pressed my palms flat against the stone of the steps I was sitting on, breathed in the gritty, smoke-filled air. I felt exactly as if I were a character in a book I’d read, and the idea was as weird as it was thrilling. In some ways it seemed unreal, all of it, like I was lying on my
back in Mercy Library the whole time, listening to some story; in other ways it seemed like all I’d had to do, all these years, was walk right out of one life and into another. Like Oakley, my family, my past were all things I could have just blinked away.

I stood up. I pushed past people and ducked under railings, looking all around for some way in, some crack in the city’s ferocious, dirty facade. A few blocks later I saw a sign, and my heart leapt:
Apartment for Rent.
I had plenty of money. I took a deep breath, walked up the stairs, and pressed the doorbell. I’ll be okay, I thought. I patted my pink lace skirt, reaching unconsciously for the weighted-down hem. After several long minutes, an old lady opened the door and peered down at me.

“I’m here about the apartment,” I said quickly, before she could shut the door again.

She laughed. “Girl, where are your parents? Is this a prank?”

The woman slammed the door shut and did not open it again, though I stood on her porch for ten minutes more, ringing her doorbell and trying to hold back tears. For a moment I thought longingly of my bed in Oakley, my warm covers and Geraldine snoring across from me.

I turned back to the street. By now it was practically dark. All the streetlamps had snapped on, and the car lights bounced off the pavement, confusing me as I walked along, dragging my sack. Brightly lit stores lined the main streets, which swarmed with men and women who fell against me as they pushed past, on their way to the next place and the next. I glanced into windows to check that I was still there, that I was there at all. I cursed myself for having timed my arrival so badly and being so lacking when it came to understanding the world and its ways.

I walked on, past sleek silver buildings and squat brick ones, open-faced mansions and run-down tenements. Every single thing was like a new description from a book I’d read, come to life.

I turned off the main avenue and onto a narrow side street. After what seemed like hours, the city seemed to quiet down. The streets widened and turned desolate. The buildings expanded and blew smoke across the sky. I stopped suddenly. Factories. Sister Carrie. I smiled, despite myself, at the strangeness of it.

I walked past the first factory and then the second. My eye caught a flash of white to my right. I looked up, realized there was a line of row houses there, huddled together. In front of one was a small white sign. I crept up closer and saw that it said, “Rooms Available. Women only.”
Please,
I breathed.
Please.
My heart skittered in my chest as I climbed up to the door. “St. Mary’s House for Women,” I read, on a golden plaque outside the door.

I rang the doorbell and stood perfectly still, afraid to even breathe. It was pitch black outside by now, and the factories were spooky in the dim light of the streetlamps, the smoke ghostly as it rose to the sky.

A sturdy, middle-aged woman opened the door and squinted out at me. She looked me over and nodded at my sack. “I presume you are looking for a room?” she asked. Her voice was surprisingly delicate for her harsh, thick looks, her sloppy hair stuffed into a bun.

I nodded. My mouth was bone dry.

“Well, let’s not catch ourselves a chill. Come in, and I’ll show you around.”

I stepped forward, let her lead me up a flight of stairs. “Two dollars a week for a room,” she said, turning back to me. “Three for room and board. The bathroom’s down the hall and the kitchen downstairs.”

“That sounds fine,” I said, trying to fill each word with a sense of how dependable I was, how responsible. I could hear my voice trembling and was surprised when she just nodded and led me into the dour upstairs hallway, with its gray carpet and walls. She withdrew a ring full of keys and picked through it daintily with her small hands.

“We abide by Christian rules here, though some abide better than others,” she said, turning to me.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and she smiled for the first time, wrinkles shooting out along her cheeks. A minute later I was stepping into a tiny, musty, flaking room with a small dresser and bed, a closet and window.

My heart filled. A room of my own, I thought. No Geraldine. No father’s shadow in the doorway. No cornfields outside the window, trees like brushes against the white sky. I thought of the trinkets scattered across Mary’s desk in Mercy Library, how I had vowed to have my own things someday.

“It’s perfect,” I said, nodding, tears pricking at my eyes.

She smiled and raised her eyebrows, then made some quick movements with her hands and passed the key to me, hanging from a wire circle.

“Well, good-night, then,” she said, as I handed her three of the dollars I had stashed in my skirt pocket. “My name is Esther, by the way.”

“Tessa Riley,” I said, and the words felt strange and strong on my tongue, as if I were marking the letters into dirt.

She left, and I walked into the center of the room and just stood with my eyes closed, breathing it in. Letting my relief and sorrow and excitement slide into each corner, over each inch of carpeting and flaking gray-white paint. I looked out the window, at the smoke that seemed to hover above the buildings. I spread myself out on the lumpy mattress and stared at the shadows against the wall. I felt the exhaustion relax from my muscles and spread throughout my body, weighing down every inch of skin, every vein.

And then, without even meaning to, I thought again of my quilt-covered bed in Oakley, and I imagined my mother and father and Geraldine and my brothers, wondered if they missed me at all. If they were worried or sad. I pictured the fields and the wooden floor and the giant
countertop covered in dirt and vegetables. A longing moved through me that I couldn’t understand. How could I feel homesick? What was wrong with me? They never wanted you, I told myself. I closed my eyes and thought of my mother with her face turned to the wall. I thought of Geraldine alone in our big room, the silence of it engulfing her. I thought of my father bending over me, and the ache went straight to my gut, as if I’d been stabbed.