Rain Village (7 page)

“He was pale, almost completely white. He was only a boy, you know. His hair was like the palest blond dipped in the ashes of a forest fire and his eyes were dark like wet river rocks. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep, and then he’d stalk around and curse the rain and the dark, and me. I would huddle in the blankets and block out every single thing but the warm imprint of his body, the faint smell of eucalyptus still in the bed.”

She stopped, and the night was quiet. All we could hear was the
light lapping of the river, the slight wind stirring the grass and weeping willows and oak.

“His voice,” she whispered, “was soft and clipped, as if he’d been born in some other country. But he hadn’t been. Sometimes he could sit for hours and never say a word. He would carve designs into wood. If I moved or sighed, he noticed; he was always watching me, like I was made of glass.”

Her voice was so low I had to lean forward.

“He died. He drowned in the river. I remember how white and cold he was in the water, the leaves sticking to his skin. It’s why I left. Why I left Rain Village the way my older sister had before me. I left my mother, father, sister, and everything I’d known. William died in the river, and the leaves were like leeches on his skin.”

The night seemed to have darkened. Mary looked at the sky. I shivered, and she turned to me, reached up and touched my hair.

“You will fall in love, too. You won’t be unlucky like me.” She pulled herself up and sat cross-legged, facing me. “I left home. I just left, left my family and the rain and the river. And I went all over, and then I came here. Sometimes that is the best we can do in life: seek out new families and homes when the old ones have failed us.”

“Is that when you joined the circus?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. She tilted her chin to the sky, her hair sticking every which way. She reached out her hand and slipped it into mine. Her long fingers dwarfed mine, and my pale skin seemed to glow next to hers.

“Do you miss Rain Village?”

She nodded, bending her head to her chest. “We lived in a stone house,” she said a moment later, smiling slightly, “in the middle of a forest. A forest as big as the sky. The river where they found William ran almost straight through the forest, about a ten-minute walk from our house. It was a river unlike any you’ve ever seen, Tessa.”

“I’ve only seen one,” I said. “This one right here.”

“You haven’t ever traveled out of here?”

“My father would never let us. He says the world outside of Oakley is filled with evils.”

She smiled. “I don’t think Oakley is immune to that, no matter what your father says. And why blame the world when it’s right here?” She tapped her chest.

“I think he has evil in him,” I whispered. “He makes all of us cry, sometimes. Is that evil?”

She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I think it is.”

“I want to travel,” I said. “I want to see Rain Village, and the circus.” I tried to call forth a picture in my mind. “What was the river like?”

“Oh,” she said, closing her eyes but holding my hand tight, “it was filled with salmon and other pink fish. The fishermen used to set their lines and let themselves drift along the water. They’d fall asleep like that, sprawled out on the fishing boats, the rain plinking down on their bodies.”

“That sounds terrible,” I said. “All that rain.”

“It was weird,” she said. “No one there complained about the rain, the dampness. There it was just normal. When I left, I baked myself in the sun, and I’ve been brown ever since. Before, in Rain Village, I was as pale as a ghost. I didn’t even know how curly my hair was until I left home and saw it dry for the first time.”

“That’s not true!”

“Oh, it is,” she said. “There, my face was covered in freckles, from the rain. When I left my skin turned completely clear. See?”

I leaned in and stared at her face, her brown, smooth skin. I gasped. “It’s true!” I said.

“Unless I’m lying, of course.” She laughed, and I was relieved, seeing her happy. “Everyone there was a storyteller, you know. At night the fishermen
docked their boats and everyone gathered to tell stories. The water would have turned black by then, and if it weren’t too cloudy all the stars would be out, like they are now, like salt sprinkled over ink. Everyone who looked normal and friendly in the daylight turned spooky at night, with the flickering light and the black water behind them.”

“What stories did they tell?” I asked, not even noticing Mary’s spice scent anymore, the scent of rain was so forceful in my nostrils.

“Oh, all kinds,” she said. “Gossip and legends, kids’ stories, stories about our past.”

“Tell me one!” I begged, pressing my hands together.

She raised her eyebrows at me. “You really want to hear one?”

“Yes!”

“Well,” she said, “one of my favorites was a story about a prince and a peasant girl. My mother used to tell it when I was a kid.”

“What was it?”

“Okay,” she said, lowering her voice as if she were sharing a great secret. She leaned back on the grass and I lay next to her. Her hair spread out in corkscrews that tumbled down over my shoulder. I picked up strands of her hair and wrapped the curls around my fingers, and we lay there side by side.

“There was once a beautiful peasant girl,” she began, “who wore dresses that came up to her chin and ended past her toes. The girl lived in a tiny cottage with her husband, who was a good strong man who worked the fields.”

I laughed, imagining him in the fields in Oakley, the ones I ran past every day. I could
see
it.

“One day a prince rode into town on a gleaming black horse. He was so rich that every time he opened his purse men and women gasped as if he held the moon in there. But those women didn’t have a chance. When the prince saw the peasant girl, he fell instantly in love and was determined
to marry her. He didn’t care whether or not the girl loved him back, and didn’t let the fact that she already had a husband deter him one bit. The peasant girl was not interested in the prince at all, and when he began hunting her down in the fields, she was sure that the devil himself had found her. ‘Help!’ she cried, and ran like a ribbon through the crops, so fast the prince thought she’d disappeared. But this only made him more determined; he bought the most luxurious home in town and moved into it that day.”

I closed my eyes, picturing it, imagining a red ribbon streaming through the cornfields, whooshing out into the road.

“Soon enormous crates began arriving, one by one, filled with all the prince’s earthly belongings. He settled in and began trying to lure the girl in every earthly way—hosting lavish parties, sending jewels to her house, writing her poetry-filled letters—but he did not understand the strength of the girl’s love for her husband, or her religious fervor. Finally the prince realized that to possess this girl he’d have to find a way to bind her to him forever, so he sold off every single possession he had ever owned: every last jewel in his gigantic jewel vault, every richly brocaded shirt, every solid-gold candlestick and fork, every exotic bird in his private atrium. When the last item had been sold and he wore nothing but a simple peasant’s shirt and overalls, the prince sold his soul to the devil. He took the sum of his earthly life and brought it to a famous jeweler, who spent a month in his laboratory, mixing it all up in a great iron vat until, finally, he produced one perfect, sparkling opal ring, a ring more valuable than any ring made before or since.”

Mary sat up and pressed her hands into the grass. I thought of every beautiful thing I’d ever seen, reduced down to one stone. My mind wrapped around that image and held it close.

“The next time the prince saw the beautiful peasant girl, he approached her without a fear in his heart. Not even God could save the
peasant girl from the fate that had been given her, the strength of that ring and the devil were so strong. Her heart split into pieces, the girl walked into her husband’s barn and came out on her favorite horse. Then she stopped, and the prince leapt upon it, and neither of them was ever heard from again. Until the day he died, the poor, abandoned husband prayed for the soul of his lost wife, who had disappeared into the world and, by all accounts, lived unhappily ever after.

“They used to say that the prince and the peasant girl founded Rain Village. People used to whisper it,” Mary said. “They said that that was why we were all so heartbroken there, because it had been passed down by our ancestors.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, nodding slowly and whisking an eyelash from my cheek with her thumb. “You cannot escape your fate, Tessa, or where you come from.”

I looked at her and was surprised to see how strange she looked, as if something fierce and sad were beating its way out of her.

“What is it, Mary?” I whispered, but she just reached out and entwined her fingers with mine.

My thirteenth birthday came and went that second summer. I’d been working in Mercy Library for almost a year. It felt like more time than that had passed; I felt like a whole new person and marveled sometimes as I watched myself with a library patron, recommending
The Canterbury Tales
or
The Divine Comedy.
Mary waited until we closed the library to present me with my very own rhinestone-covered skirt she’d sewn for me herself.

“Someday you can wear this to dinner with your boyfriend,” she said, grinning. “You’ll be the prettiest girl in the restaurant.”

I turned red down to my toes as I slipped into it. Before she let me look in the mirror, Mary took out a shiny plastic purse full of cosmetics and spread glitter and powder over my face. She painted black arching eyebrows over my own, and drew my lips into a bow. She twisted my hair onto the top of my head and stuck long ivory pins through it.

“Look,” she said, and I walked straight to the mirror and peered into it, at the strange sparkling girl staring out. Mary came behind me, resting her chin on my shoulder. “Look at our eyes,” she said. “You’d think we were related.” I looked back and forth and saw it was true: my eyes looked big and blue, almost sloped like hers, though in my case it was the makeup more than anything else.

“I don’t look so terrible,” I whispered, and was immediately embarrassed to have said it out loud. But it was true: I looked almost pretty, my light hair falling in my face and piled on my head, my face sparkling with glitter.

Mary laughed. “Of course not,” she said. “You’re beautiful, Tessa. Don’t listen to anyone else. People try to shut out beauty wherever they can in this world, but it’s a mistake.”

I smiled, traced the lines of my face in the mirror.
Beautiful,
she had said. I couldn’t see it, but I basked in it anyway, rocking back and forth so that the skirt swished around my knees.

It was around that time that, one day, Mary sent me into the library’s depths with a box of old books for storage, and I came across an old dusty box marked “Circus” in faded letters, hidden behind a stack of ancient encyclopedias. Mary’s circus stories had taken on the aura of dreams and myth; this box seemed impossible, sitting here before me. I dropped everything. My hands started to shake as I ripped off the tape that ran in lines across the top. I couldn’t imagine being more excited if I’d happened upon a treasure chest just lifted out of the sea.

Breathlessly, I peeled back the box cover. Even through the tissue paper they were wrapped in, I could see the sparkles and rhinestones and sequins of the leotards. I reached in and lifted out the one on top, carefully unwrapped it and held it up in the dim light. The red sequins shimmered; the leotard was so heavy and ornate that my arms grew tired holding it up. I stood up, my breath quickening, and held the leotard up to my chest, smoothed it over my belly. It extended halfway down my thighs. I could only imagine how Mary had sent hearts racing in outfits like this.

I laid the leotard neatly over another box nearby and lifted out the rest, one after another, not even caring if I messed them up, what Mary
would say. One after another I pulled the costumes out of their wrappings and held them up: vivid reds and yellows, a brilliant electric blue with clouds of sequins swirling down the sides. The colors seemed to take on a life of their own in that room, throwing light against the walls. I had never seen anything like it and was surprised at how quickly I felt transformed.
This
is what the circus is like, I thought. This color, this life.

Why hadn’t Mary shown me this stuff before? Everything she’d told me had seemed so fantastic and far away—it didn’t seem possible that anything from the circus could exist right there, in Oakley, in Mercy Library. I pressed my hand along the beaded rim of a black leotard, closed my eyes. I could
feel
it: that sensation of flying, of being over everything.

“Tessa!” I heard Mary calling from the main floor.

Hurriedly, I pushed past the wrapped costumes and found slippers and tights and caps and jeweled combs. I ran my fingers along the length of the heels, the feathers on the caps.

I heard the basement door click open and then Mary’s voice, louder now: “Tessa, are you down there?”

“Just a minute!” I cried. I grabbed the leotards and quickly folded them, layering them between sheets of tissue paper, in the box. I heard Mary’s footsteps on the stairs, slapped the box shut and shoved it in the corner.

I ran up to meet her.

“I’ve got a line up here,” she said. “I need help.”

For the rest of the afternoon I felt that box pulling at me. While Mary told fortunes in the back, I sat and checked out books, barely even looking up as I pulled out the cards to stamp and date them.
The circus,
I thought, imagining myself flying through the air, my body draped in red sparkles. The feel of the sequins and beads under my palm.

“Why don’t I go organize some of the files downstairs?” I suggested later, during a brief lull.

“Such a good worker you are,” Mary said, laughing. “Why don’t we take a tea break instead? God, I’m tired. I want to just slap these people sometimes and tell them to take a look around—of
course
they’re unhappy!”