“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.
CHAPTER FIVE
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!”
I nodded but was awash with disappointment.
“How long were you in the circus?” I asked suddenly, as we made our way back to the little kitchen.
Mary turned to me. “About five seasons, I guess,” she said. She set a pot of water to boil and reached up for the herbs.
“Were you famous?” I asked, and then, before she could answer, “Why did you leave?”
The air filled with the smell of herbs and spices. We heard the front door open and voices fill the room. “Can you help those people?” Mary asked, handing me my cup and avoiding my eyes. She seemed relieved, anxious to get rid of me.
I tried not to look too disappointed. The rest of the afternoon went by quickly, and I didn’t have a chance to go back downstairs before Mary and I closed the library. She was in a hurry to get cleaned up and go into town, and kissed me on the cheek before disappearing down the stairs to her room.
Damnit, I thought, pausing outside on the front steps, every cell of my body pulling me to that box downstairs. Calling out to me, like a secret. Reluctantly, I started the walk home. I watched the snow gleam in the moonlight and thought of Mary on the trapeze. There was a whole world buried in that box, I thought. A world brighter and more wonderful than anything I could find in Oakley.
As I cut through the town square and the giant oak trees that shaded it, I spotted a branch extending straight from one side, about six feet from the ground. No one was around aside from a few men entering the tavern on the square.
I dropped my bag and leapt up, wrapping my palms around the branch. It was easy, just like hanging from the bar on the window back home. But here I was unrestricted: I swung back and forth, then pushed up and hung from my knees. The bark scraped my skin, but I didn’t care. I was a thousand miles away from Oakley, anyway.
The next day I scrambled down into the basement before Mary could stop me. She was busy hauling in water from the pump outside, and gathering herbs from her garden to set to drying.
“I need an old newspaper for Mrs. Olsen,” I said. I ran down, past the file room and through the hall, past Mary’s room with the mattress on the floor and line of skirts hanging from a ceiling pipe. When I came to the box I pushe
d past the leotards and caps, and dug in to see what other treasures it held.
I pulled up a pile of circus programs. I grabbed the whole stack of them, spread them across the floor. It was crazy, even liberating and wild, to see photographs of things I had only heard about from Mary. I’d never quite believed her stories were real, and yet there they were: beautiful boys crossing the high wire; a woman hanging from a thin rope by her hair; and then Mary herself in midflight, soaring from the catcher’s hands back to the bar.
She was so different in the pictures, different than any way I’d ever seen her. Her hair was pulled away from her face and tucked under a red beaded cap, and her skin practically glowed under the light. Even from that far you could see the tilted shape of her eyes, the soft, fluid lines of her arms and legs as they propelled her through the air. She was a bright, magnetic spot suspended amidst the ropes and hooks and metal rings.
It was rapturous: every single picture spoke of some new wonder, some new way of moving through space. I could barely breathe. With my whole being I wanted that, what I saw in the pictures. Flight.
I closed the programs and stacked them beside me, and then, pushing past more tissue paper and wrappings, I came upon a metal bar covered over in parts with tape, a line of rope extending from either end. A thick braided rope curled like a snake at the bottom of the box. Various chains and hooks and smaller ropes were scattered among the coils.
A trapeze, I realized, and rigging, and a web. I wrapped my fingers around the metal, and I swear they tingled with the magic of what that bar could do, where it could take me.
And then I no longer cared about getting into trouble, what Mary would say when she saw I’d been snooping. I grabbed that bar and ran up to meet her as quickly as my legs could carry me.
I burst into the room. It was one of those bright mornings when the sun slanted across the floor and all the books turned warm on the shelves. Mary stood at the front desk, next to a pile of books.
“Mary,” I began, breathlessly, “I want you to teach me the trapeze.”
Her eyes fell on the bar in my hands, and a strange look crossed her face, one I couldn’t place. “Where did you find that?”
“Downstairs, among the boxes.”
“You’ve been sneaking around?” she asked, her eyes flashing up at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pleading. “I just came across it. I had to look. I saw the costumes, the programs, you flying—it was all beautiful, Mary, the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“Those things are sealed away for a reason,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help it. Please teach me. Please.” I stopped when I saw how angry she was.
“Tessa,” she said slowly, “I haven’t flown on the trapeze for years now. It’s ancient history. Put that back, and don’t let me see it again.”
I was close to sobbing. “But Mary, I can feel it in my bones. I have to do this.”
She looked at me, her face reddening, and then stalked away. I knew better than to follow her.
For the rest of the day we worked in silence. When the evening came, I stormed from the library, slamming the door behind me as hard as I could. I don’t need her, I thought, kicking the side of the stairwell, slamming the dangling Mercy Library sign as I ran past. I ran until I reached the town square and the cluster of giant oak trees. I threw off my coat, furiously, and leapt up to one of the branches, started to swing.
As I swung, letting the air soothe me, the cold rip past my tears and anger, I heard laughter. I stopped, turned my head to see a group of kids clustered under another tree, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle between them.
“Tessa!” they taunted. “Tessa the witch!”
I dropped to the ground. My feet crunched into the snow. I was so angry I felt my body dissolve, until I was one voice screaming through the dark. “I hope all of you die!” I cried.
Before I turned and ran home, I swear they all looked genuinely frightened. I flew through the night in a blaze of rage and heartbreak, then collapsed in the cornfield behind my house, hidden away from the world. I huddled against a stalk, grabbed the root, and bent my whole body around it. Tears of frustration ran down my face.
Finally, maybe hours later, I sat up and stretched, blinked at the moonlight. I turned and looked up through the corn at my house, the dark windows. Shivering, I pulled out my book, Sister Carrie, and read about Carrie for an hour, getting lost in her world of factories and concrete before dragging myself off to sleep.
Things remained tense between Mary and me throughout the next day. My tenacity surprised me, but I discovered a stubbornness in myself that I’d never known I had.
“Please, Mary,” I said again and again, then rushed off in tears or anger when she refused to budge.
“Tessa, I’m telling you,” she said, following me back into the stacks, “I barely remember anything at all.”
I kept my eyes on the shelf in front of me. “You aren’t that old, Mary. You remember. I know you do.”
“It’s too dangerous, anyway,” she said.
“Couldn’t you show me just one time?” I asked. My eyes filled with tears, and I turned to her. “Just once?”
“You know, Tessa,” she said, “it’s beautiful to see you so sure of what you want, so passionate about something. But why does it have to be the trapeze? I gave all that up. For good.”
“Because I’ll be good at it,” I said, surprising myself.
She stared at me as I purposefully arranged a pile of books. “I don’t think I can do it,” she said, finally. I looked up at her and was surprised by the expression on her face, a look of something like wistfulness. Her face closed then, like a trap door, and she turned and walked away.
She avoided me for the rest of the day, sending me back into the stacks again and again with books to organize and shelve. I was nearly crazy with frustration, but when the sun went down I walked home slowly, scheming all the while. I walked through the town square and ignored the group of kids sitting under the tree, even when they tried to provoke me. Maybe I could get Mary to hang up the trapeze and learn by myself, I thought. Riley Farm opened up in front of me, but I barely noticed. Maybe there was someone else who could teach me. Though I knew that such a thing was unheard-of in Oakley, before Mary Finn.
When I stepped into the house, it took me a second to notice my father standing before me, in the dark hallway. I pulled back in surprise. He’d been watching for me, I realized, from the living room window, and all at once I felt like I’d been caught doing something wrong.
His eyes bored into me. I stood immobilized, my heart skipping forward and hammering against my chest. I saw it then, in his hand. A book. My book, the one I had carefully hidden under my mattress the night before.
Slowly, I looked back at his face. He was massive in front of me, a mountain. He could have reached out and picked me up between his fingers, I thought, crushed me under his toe. There was nothing more terrifying in all the world than my father standing there with Sister Carrie in his hand. He loomed over me, then leaned forward.
I jumped, sure he would hit me. I braced myself for it, my whole body tensing into a wall of muscle and bone. My father lifted his hand, and I shut my eyes. A moment later a loud thwap! shook the house. I opened my eyes, saw my book lying on the floor, its pages twisted and crushed.
“Get this trash out of here,” he said. “Get it out now.”
He turned and left the room, and I crumpled to the floor, snatched the book up into my hands and under my skirt. How had I let this happen? I knew he would punish me. I could already feel his hands coming down.
I ran from the house and out into the road. Just outside our property I knelt down to bury the book, but then thought better of it. My father’s eyes seemed to follow me, wherever I went, and I could think of only one place to go where things would be okay.
I ran to the herb garden in back of Mercy Library, dug out the silver key Mary hid there, and
let myself in. I must have been a sight to behold: ragged and out of breath, a mashed-up book in my hands. I made my way into the dark space, hoping Mary would still be there.
The whole place was dead quiet. I felt funny and started tiptoeing through. I passed the little kitchen, and the herbs seemed spooky in the dark, roiling around in their glass jars, glittering and smoking as if they were all dreaming in there. I slipped past, through the stacks and into the main part of the library. Mary wasn’t anywhere. It was so dark I could barely see.
I tiptoed to the basement door and cracked it open. “Mary,” I called. There was no answer. I peered down but couldn’t make anything out.
Sighing, I headed to Mary’s desk and sat down, cradling the book in my lap. A power seemed to surge from Mary’s seat and rush through me, up my back and arms, to my face. It’s okay, I thought. Shhh. But the panic took hold in my gut and wouldn’t leave. Never in my life had I so openly disobeyed my father. I felt tears rush to my eyes and wished Mary were there to comfort me. My father was capable of anything. This, I knew to my bones. Could I just stay here? I wondered. It was the first time the thought had truly seized me: maybe I could stay here forever, never go home. Maybe I never needed to see my family again.
And then I heard it: Mary laughing. She must not have heard me before. I swung open the basement door and ran down the steps, toward her room. A faint light shone through the crack beneath her door. How hadn’t I seen it before? I almost forgot everything, my relief was so strong.
I pushed open the door and gasped. Mary was crouching on top of a naked man, her body bare and slick with sweat. Her breasts were full and round, her hair nearly wet, sticking to her neck. The man’s skin was paler than hers. His hands gripped her hips. I didn’t recognize him.
I felt completely shattered. Mary looked up at me, and her mouth dropped open, her hands rushed to her breasts. “Tessa!” she said, and quickly rolled off the man, to her side. She grabbed for her clothes on the floor next to the mattress. The man sat up and looked at me, annoyed.
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