Rain Village (33 page)

But more than that, I had the strange feeling that Costas
knew
me. Knew the dark places that lay burrowed inside me, the absence and loss that were always there. I wanted so badly to ask him about Rain Village—how much he knew, where it was, how long it would take him to get there.

Later, when everyone began drifting off to bed, I heard Lollie offer Costas her empty compartment or Geraldo’s car, which he almost never slept in.

“No, thank you,” Costas said. “I prefer to set up my own tent. I’ve been sleeping in it for weeks now.” I heard him laughing and thanking her, thanking everyone. I heard Lollie direct him to the sideshow camp where most of the other tents were set up.

“Let’s go,” Mauro whispered, and pressed my skin with his hand.

“Okay,” I nodded. I looked up again at Costas. “See you tomorrow,” I said. “I would like to hear more of your stories.”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled.

“Good night,” Mauro said curtly, and we turned back to the train. I resented him so much at that moment it was like a tangible thing burning inside me.
Stop it,
I thought. I threw my arms around him and kissed him before we went to bed, trying to reassure him, trying to block Costas out of my mind.

“I love you,” I whispered.

That night I could not sleep. Mauro pulled me into him and I lay with my head against his smooth chest, watching the moonlight that streamed in through the slats of the window shade, illuminating the room. His skin was warm under my cheek. I could hear him breathing, knew he was still awake,
lying there watching the light like I was. Keeping my eyes closed and pretending to sleep, I rolled over onto my side and hunched up with my knees to my chest and my back to him. The minutes and hours passed.

Finally, late into the night, when I was sure Mauro was asleep and when I couldn’t bear the silent car any longer, I slipped out of bed as quietly as possible, inching my way off the mattress and to the floor. I leaned over the bed and put my face close to Mauro’s to make sure he wasn’t awake. I pulled on a shirt and skirt, then ran out of the car and into the empty moonlit lot.

I was just taking a walk, I told myself. I stepped lightly over the candy wrappers, cups, and programs that littered the ground. The Ferris wheel loomed over the lot like a monster from the sea. I had forgotten how eerie the circus could be, how quiet and shimmering.

I crept over to the huddle of tents, past the big top and scattered throughout the midway. I recognized Costas’s tent right away, the pale green canvas I’d seen him carrying earlier. It was apart from the other tents, closer to the edges of the midway. My heart started pounding so loudly it drowned out everything else. I had such a good life, performing with the Velasquez Circus, traveling all over, living with a man I was in love with and who loved me more than anything. It was crazy for me to think that I needed anything else.

But I found myself standing in front of his tent, crouching down to it. Tapping the canvas. Bending down and crawling into the tent when he lifted up the flap. Sitting with my legs crossed next to him. With the flap tied open, I could faintly see him in the moonlight spilling in.

“I was hoping you would find me,” he said.

I looked at his gypsy face and green eyes. He sat facing me, and our knees touched. I felt as though I could tell him anything, and had to remind myself that he was a stranger. For several long moments we just looked at each other.

“You were really the boy in the story, weren’t you?” I asked, finally.

He laughed. “It’s amazing that you heard of me and my story. That Mary knew.” His voice was soft, deep.

“Tell me about the place you grew up in,” I said. “The way you were kept from the world. It’s all true, isn’t it?”

He smiled. He pushed back the hair that had fallen over his face. And then he told that ancient story, the one Mary had whispered in Mercy Library as the sun slanted through the windows. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and goose bumps rose on my skin as Costas spoke of the father who had kept him hidden away from everything, out in the middle of the country.

“For over seventeen years I lived in the center of Turkey with no one but my father for company,” he said. “When I turned eighteen, he decided to introduce me to the world. We threw our clothes in a bag and walked out together, farther and farther, and everything changed as we walked. We came upon roads and wagon tracks; the trees changed color; and I began to see little houses and then a girl I might have dreamt of, if I’d known to dream of such things before.”

“The girl with red toenails and black hair down to her knees?” I asked, unable to sit still.

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “Yes. Poppy. I married her, and we have a son.”

“Oh,” I said, wincing a little. “It is a story Mary told many times. I would ask her to tell it to me when I was most sad, and imagined what it must have been like, seeing those girls with jewels in their hair. I always felt hidden away, like you were.”

“It was wonderful,” he said. “Everything opening up, like all the flowers blooming at once.”

“And you have a son with Poppy?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “A boy. Four years old. And you are married to the tightrope walker?”

“Yes,” I said, blushing and looking down. “What happened then?”

“We moved to Greece,” he said, “and broke my father’s heart. We were happy for a few years, until I started thinking about the past. And started this journey. First to find Mary, and now the youngest sister, who is still there. In Rain Village.”

I remembered them from Mary’s stories—Katerina, the older sister who’d left when Mary was a child, and Isabel, the young one Mary had left behind.

“Isabel,” I said. “The youngest.”

“Yes,” he said, looking straight into me. “I’ve left my wife and son to seek out my own past and history. My aunt, my family. To find what beats in my blood. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

I looked at him, unconsciously tracing Mary through his features and gestures. I watched his face as if it could explain to me why it was so important for us to find out who we are and where we come from. Why we think that history can fill the holes that nothing else can reach.

“I dream of it, you know,” I said. “Rain Village. All the time.”

“So come with me.”

I felt his gaze in every part of my body. I felt as if I had found a crucial part of myself, like my whole life had led me to that moment.

“I don’t know why it’s so important,” I said. “To go there.”

“Is it?”

I looked at him. “Yes,” I said, and then the feelings rushed over me, the thoughts crystallizing even as I said them. “Without her, I never knew anything good. She
gave
me my life. And I never even knew her, what made her so sad. What made her walk into the river. I hate that I don’t know that. I have to know that. Is that crazy?” I almost couldn’t look at him. It seemed insane that I could even think to tell him these things.

He leaned forward. “No,” he said, gently. “It’s your past. Who you are. I was happy, too, but never whole, never. There was always something missing.”

“They don’t understand,” I said, swallowing back tears. “Not really. She changed my life. I mean, she gave me my life.”

He stretched out his hand, placed it over mine. “Is that really true?” he asked. “Sometimes people just spark things in us that are already there, don’t you think?”

“No,” I said. And then, more emphatically, “No.”

He watched me, waiting.

“She taught me how to read,” I said. “How to
see
things. She taught all of us that. Everyone in Oakley took to books and reading, because of her. Except my family.” I thought of Geraldine sneaking under my mattress to find my books. “She gave me words,” I said, “and vision. She taught me how to see the world differently. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s like when you walked into the world after all those years of being hidden away. That’s how I imagined myself, as like you. Except with me it happened on the floor of that library. She’d tell me stories and read poems to me, and it was like the entire world just cracked open and was different. Because of her.”

“It must have been very hard for you when she died,” he said softly, leaning toward me.

“Yes,” I said, conscious of his skin, his smell. He could touch places in me that Mauro couldn’t, I realized. “It was.”

“It must have been hard to see that she could not save herself, when she had done so much to save you.”

“I never understood,” I said. “She showed me that there was the circus, and then she wouldn’t leave with me. I asked her, you know. To leave with me.”

“What did she say?”

I felt I was half there with Costas, half back in Oakley with her. Sitting by the river eating strawberries, listening to her describe her fate. “She said she couldn’t leave. That sometimes the world closed down until there was no room left. She wanted me to go without her.”

“That is a terrible story.”

“She was done with life. I didn’t know that then. I don’t understand it now.”

“Have you never felt that way?” he asked.

I stared at him. “Have you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Many times. I’ve always felt there was a hole at my center, that I had no place, no home.”

“But you have a wife and a son.”

“And you have a husband,” he said. “And the circus. I have never seen anything so extraordinary as you in the air, Tessa. And yet here you are.”

“But I have never felt like I was done with life,” I said then, defensive suddenly, a new feeling moving through me, something strong and ferocious. “Even at the moment when I knew Mary was gone and I felt that I had nothing in the world.”

Suddenly his palm was on my waist and his face moving toward me. His eyes fierce and blazing. I felt my whole body tense, my hands shaking.

“I should go back,” I said, pulling away.

“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”

I nodded, unable to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for me, and I ran out into the night, disheveled, my heart racing. I couldn’t see straight. I ran past the big top, stopped in the menagerie, and leaned against the tiger’s cage. Tears rolled down my face. The tiger crept over to the bars. I reached out and touched her fur.

It all hit me then: how I had never really known so many things about Mary, never known what had made her so broken or what had made her step into the river and drown herself that autumn day. How I hadn’t known about the crazy ring that had gleamed from her neck, the one she’d told me about in her story of the peasant girl. How I had never even known what had led her to that library in Oakley to read thick books and turn her back on her own life.
I had visions of people following me, hunting me down,
she had said. She had given up on life, left me alone to face the future. I sobbed, and the tiger pressed her body against the cage, comforting me. I thought then that what Costas had said was true for me, too: something had been missing in my life, hovering around the edges and flashing in my periphery, a nagging sense of having left something half done. I needed to understand what had happened to her. I needed to understand it so badly that it seemed crazy I hadn’t been to Rain Village already.

Sunlight crept over the lot. It was one of those moments in life that seemed to have always been there, when you know so strongly that something has to occur that it may as well have already happened.

When I got back to the car Mauro was sitting up on the bed waiting for me.

“Where were you?” he asked. His anger was a palpable presence in the room, making its own shadows against the wall.

“I took a walk,” I said. My eyes filled with tears. I was grateful for the window shades blocking out the dim sunlight. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“You saw him.”

“Yes,” I said. “Just to talk. I needed to talk to him.”

“I don’t understand. Why?”

I stood there. “Because of
Mary,
” I said, my voice breaking. “Don’t you see? Because of everything that happened.” I gestured helplessly.

“Tessita,” he said, softening. “That was so long ago. Why do you keep it so close to your heart?” He came over to me, cupped my face in his palm. “You have to let go of it, all that
dolor.
”

I leaned in, let him pull me to his chest. I wanted to believe that there was nothing beyond this, right here. That the pain inside me didn’t matter.

“You don’t understand,” I said finally, pulling away and looking up at him. “This is my one chance. I can put everything right.”

Even in the pale light I could see the stricken look on his face. “Your chance?” he repeated. “Chance for what?” He flung up his hands. “What can you set right?”

My face was raw with tears, my throat sore from crying. “I think I have to leave, Mauro,” I said, before I even realized I would say it. My voice cracked as the words poured out. “I have to go to Rain Village. I have to see it, put all of this to rest.”

He looked stunned. “What? You just mean a visit, both of us?” He stared at me and then looked, suddenly, as if I’d smacked him across the face. “With the
gitano,
” he said.

“Not because of him.” Even as I said it I was not sure what was true, and what wasn’t. “It’s something I feel in my bones, pulling me. I will come back. I will. I just need to
see.
”

“What about the circus?” he asked, pacing the floor, red with anger. “All of this? You’re just leaving to go to some imaginary place? This man comes and that’s it,
adios?
How do you know he’s not just telling stories?”

“I’m coming back,” I said. “I just know I have to go there. It’s like one of Lollie’s visions. I just
know.
”

“You just know that you have to go with
him.
”

I didn’t know if he was right. Suddenly I wasn’t sure of anything. If the crazy fever still had me under its hold or if Mary had come straight from the past to yank me from my future.

He turned around and looked right into me. “Why do you want
to bring out all this pain, Tessita? We’re so happy. Why can’t you let it alone?”