Rain Village (31 page)

We stretched out on the bed and sat with our backs against the headboard. Geraldine told me of her life and job, the farm, and some neighbors I only vaguely remembered. She told me that Mercy Library had been turned into a supermarket that my brothers sold crops to, and all the books had been donated to a new school the town had built a couple years back.

The day slipped into dusk. At one point, late in the day, Mauro stopped into our car and almost jumped when he saw Geraldine. Then he looked at me, twisting his head back and forth in confusion.

“Mauro,” I said, “this is my sister, Geraldine. Geraldine, meet my husband, Mauro.”

I laughed out loud as her eyes grew wide and she looked him over slowly, from top to bottom. “Wow,” she breathed, flushing all over.

Mauro was no less taken aback.
“Tu hermana?”
he asked, looking at me and shaking his head. I smiled and shrugged. “Well, then,” he said, putting out his hand to her, “I guess that makes you my sister, too. Come, join us all for dinner. You have to tell us all of Tessa’s secrets, since she has so many.” He looked back at me and winked.

I couldn’t believe how well we all got along that night. Carlos took one look at Geraldine and sat next to her until showtime, enthralling her with stories about Mexico and the Ramirez family’s colorful history. Lollie looked from Geraldine to me and back again, smiling.

“You are both so beautiful,” she kept saying. “Like two petals on the same rose.”

I gave Geraldine a front-row seat for the show that night, and as I twirled inside the hoop and on the rope I felt her eyes watching me, seeing something that she thought might help her on her way. I didn’t know what it was. I thought of my dream, years before, of my family sitting under me, watching me the way the rest of the crowd did.

After the show we drank sangria in front of a huge bonfire. My husband on one side of me and my sister on the other, Paulo and Serena’s babies—three of them by then—running around screaming and naked, Carlos and José laughing and telling Geraldine stories about how scared I had been when I’d first come, how mean Lollie had been, while Lollie and Ana and the twins and everyone else just laughed and talked and drank.

There was so much more I wanted to say to Geraldine that day and couldn’t. I could not tell her how much I had always longed to sit with her the way we were then, as friends, as sisters. I could not tell her how
the mention of my father turned my blood to ice, or that just hearing Mary’s name made her more real to me than she had been for years. My Mary and the one Geraldine spoke of were the same—not the woman on the flying trapeze, but the town librarian who drove men mad and set them to dreaming. I could not believe that the world I’d done everything to suppress was still out there, beating with life and love and heartbreak, like every other place.

Before she left Geraldine took me aside, by the fire, and just held on to me. We were both drunk and happy, standing in the hazy light.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For everything. I’m sorry I never came to you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I whispered.

Geraldine’s visit awakened something new in me, something that nagged at me over the next few years and brought back memories I’d thought were gone forever, flashes of the cornfields behind our house, empty and bleak as a nightmare. My family took on a new shape in my mind—no longer frozen in Mary’s world, they had lives that extended parallel to mine, with new loves and careers and regrets and sadnesses. All the souls from my past began inhabiting my life like ghosts. Sometimes my memories were so strong I would barely see Mauro in front of me, touching my face, taking my hands in his own.

Until then the circus had seemed like a separate, magical world existing outside time and space. It had its own force and energy, its own rules as it moved from one town to another. I had always felt a little like if I stepped away from the circus, time would restart: my father would reemerge from the fields, push me back down into the dirt, and block out the moon.

But Geraldine’s visit set something in motion, set my heart to remembering. My perspective started to shift, bit by bit, and memories
that surprised and shocked me began to occupy my mind, chipping away at the layers of myth and story the circus had given me.

I began recalling sights and smells and voices, began staring at Mary’s picture and remembering what it had felt like to sit next to her on a wooden floor, watching the sun go down, dreading the walk home. I reached past the pain of family and leaving, back into my childhood, to death and the river and Mary’s hair wrapped around her neck, the water droplets clinging to her skin. And the more I reached back, the more I came to the question that had hovered around the edges of my life for years:
Who was she? Where had she come from? Why did she die?
All the unanswered mysteries at the heart of my childhood. A woman had come into my life and handed the world to me, had
seen
the world in me, but I had been too young to see her back then, as she was.

If I had I seen her, I thought, I might have been able to save her.

A few years after Geraldine’s visit, during the beginning of my seventh season with the Velasquez Circus, a breeze rose up in the south of Mexico and swept over the Mayan ruins and up the coastline, carrying the scents of clove and cinnamon into the southern states. Clothes hanging out on lines dried instantly. People stepped out of showers, reached for their towels, and found their whole bodies had gone dry. Women could no longer wear skirts in the street. The trees whipped about, tossing their heads, while flower petals spun off their stems and into the air. People began sprinkling hot chocolate with cinnamon and brewing vats of cider to satisfy the cravings the spiced air left them with. In the Velasquez Circus, we looked up and wondered at the flapping canvas, the Ferris wheel spinning too fast, the slight swaying of the train on the tracks. The scent wafted over our bodies and seeped into our skin. I was plagued by strange dreams every night, the kind that trickle into your waking life and unsettle you. We all grew restless, and took to wandering the lots and towns during the day instead of gathering in the cookhouse.

I was affected more than anyone, I think. A cough and a fever forced me to cancel performances for the first time ever and take to my bed. Mauro held me as I moaned and cried, as I writhed in my sleep and held
up my arms to protect my face from lashing rain, from sweet smoke curling into my mouth and choking me.

Mauro shut all the windows and locked them, but still the breeze pushed its way into our car and under the blankets. Mauro packed me in as tightly as he could, but nothing helped. The breeze rubbed up on me like a cat. The spice scent crept into every pore on my skin, every strand of my hair.

I stayed in bed without moving. I could not even enter the ring, let alone curl my hands around the
corde lisse.
Lollie could not perform either, and Geraldo was forced to go out in the ring alone—though without her he just swung through the air uselessly, stretching out his arms to empty space. The audiences complained so much and grew so belligerent that Mr. Velasquez was forced to reduce ticket prices by as much as half.

There was nothing I could do. Mauro would sing and whisper to make me sleep, but I’d bolt awake from nightmares filled with dread and loss. I’d wake with my heart pounding in my chest, and the breeze would rustle through the sheets like an intruder. Mauro could not even touch me; he’d take my hands in his and then drop them as if they were two suns. He brought all my meals to me—plates of beans or shredded beef I left sitting on the table untouched—and he read me stories and poems. Carlos came by, too, to read, and his voice was so seductive and the stories told through it so riveting that I knew once and for all how he was able to capture all those women’s hearts, in every town we passed through.

The fever lasted for three weeks, as long as the breeze whisked through the circus and back again, trailing the scents of spices and stirring up longings of every kind. Mauro took to the bed with me some nights, nuzzled his face into my neck, and spoke of Mexico. Clementine fell into bed and dreamt of water; Ana dreamt of perfect white horses galloping as fast as light.

José was one of the worst afflicted. Clara haunted his dreams mercilessly and followed him throughout the day. He swore she toppled all the glasses of water he set down in his train car or on the long tables in the cookhouse, messed up his hair just after he’d painstakingly smoothed the pomade through it, and danced and jumped on the wire just ahead of him, trying to make him lose his balance. His girlfriend Bettina said he had bags under his eyes an inch thick and could barely concentrate on what was in front of him, worsening to such a degree that the brothers were forced to cut him from the act, at least until things returned to normal. But as one day faded into the next, with the breeze showing no signs of calming, none of us knew when that might be.

As for me, the world outside our train car no longer seemed to exist. Mauro kept pressing wet cloths to my forehead and bringing me plates of food, but the fever did not let up. I felt like I was drowning, caught underwater where all I could see was Mary’s face next to me, staring at me through a tangle of weeds. I tried to pull myself up toward Mauro’s voice and hands, but for those three weeks I could go only where the fever took me—deep into the river, to where the thousand colors of the opal stone glittered from Mary’s neck.

The day my fever finally broke, a stranger showed up at the Velasquez Circus. We had arrived at a new lot only hours before, and had begun the laborious task of setting up the entire circus and midway, starting with the big top itself. The lot was mostly empty of townies except for a few of the usual autograph-seekers. But when the man with the sleek cat’s eyes set foot on the lot and started striding purposefully toward the tent, we all knew he was no normal kind of fan. He looked like someone out of a story, with his tall, lanky body and dark hair, his soft green eyes and cruel, curving mouth. He had a bit of gypsy in him,
too; his long black coat scraped against his knees as he walked, and his boots were black and scuffed. A camera hung from his neck, a large duffel bag from his back. Drawn by a strange sort of feeling that lifted me from my bed and to my window, I threw open the curtains just in time to watch the stranger striding into the big top.

“What is it?” Mauro asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A stranger has come.”

I realized then that my skin was drenched in sweat, no longer burning the way it had been for twenty-one days straight. Suddenly I could not stand the four walls of our train car; every fiber of my body was bursting to get outside—to the sun, the air, and the big top, where the stranger waited between the open flaps. I did not even know why I was so compelled; a sort of panic had come over me, filling me only with the desire to get to the stranger as quickly as I could. I raced to get my clothes on.

Mauro and I rushed out of our car to find Lollie standing outside, dressed in her best blue flowered dress with long, draping sleeves and a swishing skirt.

“Did you notice,” she asked, “that the breeze has stopped?”

Inside the tent, the oppressive atmosphere outside gave way to an electric kind of excitement as circus folk of every stripe crowded around the stranger. The whole Vadala family was there, all the brothers, Geraldo, the twins, the new contortionist act from China, the clowns. I could hear his voice—a rasping, rich sound with an accent that spoke of verbs so complicated they would take years to learn. A terrible feeling of déjà vu came over me as we approached the middle of the tent, though we’d gone through these motions a thousand times before, a stranger showing up with a bit of news or a story to tell that’d make the children’s mouths drop and set all our hearts to racing. We were all eager to hear of life in the cities and towns we passed through but never inhabited, and we treated these travelers and storytellers like royalty on the lot,
lavishing them with front-row seats, hot meals, and a privileged spot by the bonfire, where we always gathered to listen.

This time something felt different. Perhaps it was the breeze he came in on or the two kiwi-colored eyes that hit me like pistols as I approached, but I knew that this stranger was not there to tell us of a scandal or affair. Something about his face stopped me cold.

“Here she is now,” someone said then, pointing to me.

Before I had time to think, the stranger reached his enormous hand out to me and said, “My name is Costas.”

I just blinked at him, a world taking shape in my mind.

“I have come from Turkey,” he said. “I am looking for information about Marionetta the flyer.” If Mauro hadn’t been just behind me, his hand resting protectively on my back, I think I might have tipped over and fallen to the floor.

“It’s okay,” Mauro whispered, but he could not help me. I tried to stop my hands from shaking. A grief welled up in me, so strong I thought I might be dying. My loss overpowered me; the ache came from my blood and my bones.

It was the boy from Mary’s story. It had to be.

I looked at his face, and everything Mary had said came rushing back to me. It was crazy, how it could all return in an instant, no matter how much time had gone by, no matter how far away I was from all of it. Within one moment everything that had happened between then and now had been stripped away, and I was still that girl lying on the floor of Mercy Library, dreaming of a boy with eyes like kiwis, hidden away from the beauty of the world the way I had been.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I understand that you knew Marionetta. She was my mother’s sister, my aunt. I am on my way to Rain Village.”

I stared at him. It was as if Mary had stepped straight out of the past and found me in front of the courthouse once more. Even as we
stood there I could see Costas walking with his father in the sun, see the flicker of fish out of the corner of my eye. I could hear Mary’s voice in my ear, talking about her sisters, their stone house, and the forest surrounding it. I could see her behind her desk in Mercy Library, weaving a tale about a boy who grew up in the middle of nowhere.