Rain Village (11 page)

Later, when the sun pounded the earth from the center of the sky, I found a tree with a branch flung straight out to its side, and I leapt up and grabbed it, then dropped until I was hanging down the way I had hung in the kitchen window, from my palms. As I pulled myself up into a knee-hang position, I didn’t even care that the bark scraped my skin and tore it off. I pulled myself up and over that branch until my muscles shook and burned.

I wished, suddenly, that I had a rig of my own to set up somewhere. The idea seized me: that the trapeze was the only thing that could save me. That it could burn through my body and make me pure again. Those three clean lines cutting through space, the cold metal of the bar. I longed to go back to it, but every time I turned my head toward town my feet started walking in the other direction, carrying me so far away I would start to get lost.

The next day I had an idea. I had dreamt the night before of my body hurtling through space, and then I’d seen an image from one of Mary’s brochures: a woman hanging from a long, braided rope. Twisting her body up to the side. Just one long body and a rope, moving into each other, creating a line from earth to sky.

As soon as the dawn came, I snuck into the barn and grabbed some of the rope my mother hung clothes on. I ran out into the fields, past the corn and carrots and radishes and into the wild land that bordered one side of Riley Farm, where the river ran through. Right there, surrounded by crazy weeds and flowers, a tall cragged tree rose from the ground and draped its branches everywhere. I had often visited that spot when I was younger; even on the hottest days there was so much shade and wetness there that you could burrow into the cool dirt and rest. Acorns and leaves littered the ground, and the smell was deep, like musk.

I inhaled the rich scent and stretched out my arms. Scrambling up the tree, I leaned out from the trunk and looped the rope around the strongest branch, three times to be sure the knot would hold. This was a huge task for me; I had to lean out so far to reach the right spot that I nearly fell twice. When I was finally done, I threw the rope down and watched it tap the earth. I dropped to the ground after it.

Slipping off my shoes, I dug my bare feet into the earth. I placed my palms on the rope and fingered it for a minute, getting used to its feel. I flung myself up then, and out, so that my hands were the only point of contact and the rest of my body darted out to the side. Every muscle in my body strained and pulled, but I felt clean in a way I couldn’t on the ground.

I closed my eyes and let myself go: I swung from side to side, wrapped the rope around my waist and fell into it, twisting it further around. The rope cut right into the wounds the bark had made, but I kept going, wrapping my knees over the rope, pressing so tight I could release my arms and stretch them into the air behind me. The world was reduced to the feel of that rope underneath my palm, the sound of its creaking and my own breath. The sense of my body carving lines and shapes into pure space. I hung from one arm and tried to swing myself
up, but that was when my body gave out, and—trembling, exhausted—I dropped to the ground and collapsed.

I lay there catching my breath and letting my muscles ease back down. Then I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled down to the river, which stretched behind our farm the way it did behind Mercy Library. I dunked myself in the cool water, let it rush into my cuts and bruises. Every part of me hurt. I closed my eyes and ran my fingers along the scabs that were beginning to form. Everything else wound down and stopped until it was just me, the water, the burning everywhere, and the dark, dank smell of the wet woods.

My body had no end or beginning, I thought then.

Then a strange thing happened: in the middle of all that silence I had a vision, one perfect image of a body whirling like a pinwheel or windmill about the rope, drawing a circle in the air. Up and down—a clean, straight body whipping through the air like a knife. Slicing right through it. I wondered if it could be done, if a body could even move that way. The arm would have to throw itself up and twist, even dislocate a shoulder to come back down. The body would have to be straight and lean and pure.

I pulled myself from the water and ran back to the tree, and didn’t even feel it when I wrapped my wretched, split-open palm around the rope and hoisted myself back up. Grunting with effort, I hauled myself upside down with one arm, which shook so badly I was sure I’d drop on my head at any second. And then I squeezed my eyes shut, steeled myself, and pushed my body back down again in the other direction. My shoulder felt like it was splitting in two, then popped out of the socket for the second that it took for me to rush down.

I dropped to the ground, exhausted. Crying from pain. Crying, for the first time, about everything.

When I stumbled home at dinnertime, my parents and brothers and sister stared right at me and gaped. I could feel my father’s eyes on me.

“What the hell happened to you?” Geraldine asked. “You look like you got runned over.”

My brothers snorted. My father reached over and smacked Geraldine on the face. She didn’t even flinch as her right cheek turned red and tears trickled down her face.

“I’ll be okay,” I said quickly. “I was just working at the library and fell.”

“You shouldn’t be climbing those ladders, girl,” my mother said. “You could slip right through one of those rungs.”

I looked to the ground, but all I saw was the image of a lone girl, inscribing circles in the air.

Over the next few days I went back and back. I destroyed my body against that tree, dreamt about it when I was in bed or at the dinner table. My father’s eyes followed me through every room in our house, under every stalk in the fields, but I blocked them out with the sheer force of my body slamming against oak and rope. By the third day I could do two twists in a row—with excruciating pain all through my shoulder and upper arm.
The more the better,
I thought, and swung myself back up again.

I knew Mary would be wondering what had happened to me, and I was nagged by the thought of her sitting in the library. But
she
hadn’t come looking for
me,
either. As I shimmied up the rope and wrapped my legs around it, letting it sink into my skin, I tried to convince myself that
she would know I was all right. Part of me felt that I was in the library anyway, that my real self was shelving books and stamping the book cards, sitting down with Mary to a lunch of vegetables and dark bread, while here, by the river, my shadow self twirled from the tree and back out again, clinging to a length of rope.

When I hadn’t shown up at Mercy Library for well over a week, Mary came looking for me. I had spent the day by the river practicing, honing my new trick, ripping my shoulder again and again. When I entered the kitchen and saw Mary sitting right there waiting for me, at my parents’ dinner table, my mouth literally fell open with shock.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, suddenly furious. She looked so radiant and out of place in the dark wood room, surrounded by my bulky siblings and my enormous, glowering parents. Their skin was pale and blotchy, while hers was golden and smooth. It felt like she was playing a joke on me, purposefully making my world seem even uglier than it had before.

Her eyes widened. “I haven’t seen you in over a week, Tessa. I didn’t know what to do. I kept calling.”

Her words barely registered. I wanted to scream at her, to pull her beautiful hair and slap her. Irrational, I felt that she had come there just to humiliate me, the way she was sitting right next to
him,
my father, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
She doesn’t know,
a part of me whispered, and yet in my pain and frenzy I was sure that she had come just to rub my face in it, my father and I eating at the table together, the unspeakable hanging in the air between us.

I had thought that the rope had burned the anger out of me, but in that moment, as exhausted as I was, as bloody and bruised and beaten, I felt like I could have ripped everyone in that room apart. It was unbearable, her being in that room. I couldn’t stand it.
You bitch,
I thought, trembling with rage.

“I was going to come back,” I spat. “I got sick. You didn’t have to come here. It’s no big deal.”

“I just didn’t know, Tessa.” I could see how much I was hurting her, but I didn’t care. Her being in that room made everything ugly and sordid about it stand out as if a spotlight had suddenly shone in. I was sure she could see what had happened just by looking at me. That she could take one look at my father and one look at me and know everything.

Geraldine gazed up at Mary in the most pathetic way, and I wanted to smack them both. My sister looked so stupid next to Mary, with her dull brown hair and huge white arms smeared with dirt. They were all dirty from a day in the fields, their faces smudged and worn, their work clothes stained, ripped.

And Mary like some kind of queen at the table, my father sitting just left of her, barely able to look her in the face. My mother standing by the stove, ladling out the stew. I could see how upset she was, the way the spoon shook in her hand. Next to Mary, she looked a hundred years old, a mass of wrinkles and sighs. They had set a place for Mary, I realized, and the idea of Mary at
my
kitchen table eating a bowl of brown stew while my sister and brothers just stared at her with bug eyes was too much for me to bear.

“Why don’t you just leave?” I said, and I could hear Geraldine gasp. My brothers stared at me, dumbfounded. At some level I knew my father would not scold me for my rudeness, not now, but, more than that, I didn’t care what happened. I just wanted Mary out of there as quickly as possible.

“Not so fast, young lady,” my mother said, throwing down the spoon and walking toward me. “You’ve been lying to us, too, and we want an explanation
now.
You contribute to this family and we rely on that contribution. If you’ve decided you no longer need to make a contribution, then that is something we’ll have to discuss further. Right, Lucas?”

My father stared into his stew, not making a sound.

“You’ll get the dollar from this week,” I said, before my father could answer. You could feel the shock in the room, and still my father just sat there, not uttering a word.

Mary stood up then. I saw her eyes taking everything in: the bruises on my arm, the scrapes on my hands, my split palms. I could see her struggling, trying to decide whether it was better to stay and try to help or whether that would make everything worse for me.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Tessa will still get paid; there’s no issue with that. Whenever she is feeling better, she’s welcome back.” She looked at me, pleadingly. “I’ll see you soon, and we’ll talk more then,” she said, reaching out her hand to touch my arm. I pulled away. She was shaking, about to cry, but I stood motionless and watched her go.

“Lucas?” my mother repeated.

“Let’s leave it alone right now, Roberta,” he said slowly, almost under his breath.

The front door clicked shut. My mother pursed her lips and stormed out of the room, while my father just ate his stew as if nothing had happened. When I looked at Geraldine and Matthew and Connor, they just stared back at me. I almost laughed. For the first time I, little Tessa Riley, had rendered my loudmouthed siblings speechless.

I returned to the library the next day. I had no choice. I walked down the main road, through town, and then out past the lumberyard. I had no idea how Mary would react when she saw me, whether she would
even talk to me or want me back. Rage and humiliation burned in my heart, and even though I knew she hadn’t done anything wrong, I could not make them go away. Part of me wanted so badly to see Mary and have her explain everything to me, yet I could not imagine telling her, or even releasing the words into air.

My heart pounded as I entered the building.

She looked up from behind the desk, stared at me with her blue cat’s eyes. I stared back.

“I’m sorry I went to your house, Tessa,” she said. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happening to you.”

“You should be,” I said, then picked up a pile of books from the bin to return to the shelves.

I could feel Mary’s eyes on me as I made my way into the stacks, my back straight. I could feel her grasping for something to say.

“Your hands,” she said, as I reached up to one of the shelves. “I saw yesterday. What happened?” She reached over and took my hand in hers. I snatched it away, but not before she saw the thick scabs and calluses.

“I was practicing,” I said.

“Practicing what?”

“By the river,” I said. “With a rope.”

“What is happening, Tessa?” she asked, leaning down and looking straight at me. “I tried telephoning you. Why were you gone for so long? Are you being hurt? Are they hurting you?”

I looked at her. I wanted so much to tell her what had happened out there in the corn, how sick I was now, and sad. For a moment I considered telling her about the river and the rope, my one-armed swing-overs, as I had begun to think of them. But I couldn’t. Something had slipped in between her and me in that cornfield, something I could not control.

“Is it him?” she asked, dropping her voice to a whisper.

Her eyes were dark, and it scared me, the way she looked at me then, as if she knew everything. I dropped my eyes, looked to the floor.

“No,” I said.

“You can always come to me, you know.”

I heard a tremble in her voice. I met her eyes and had never seen her look so broken, her face soft and slack, as if she’d been hit.

“You can leave home, Tessa. They can’t keep you away from the world.”

“Everything is fine,” I said. I felt dizzy, as if my head were about to explode. “I don’t know what you keep talking about.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “It’s okay.” She leaned down and kissed my forehead. The spice scent overcame me so forcefully I could barely breathe.

Without thinking, I pushed out my hand and shoved her away. And then everything welled up in me, all at once. I ran to the back of the library and out the door that led to the garden and water pump. I fell into the grass, let everything break free. I was barely even conscious of Mary right there next to me, gathering me up in her arms.