The next second, without warning, she dropped her whole body down until she was hanging by her ankles and her hands were nearly sweeping across the floor. Before I could even react, she flipped back up and hung from her hands, twisting her body again so that her waist pressed against the bar, her palms leaning down into it. She kept going, in a whirl of movement: jacking her legs up and to the sides, tossing herself over and under the bar, and then, finally, tossing herself off the bar and landing with a tiny flip and flourish.
She collapsed to the ground, out of breath. I clapped my hands, elated, and then collapsed with her. When I looked up at the shelves and the books, it seemed amazing that we were still there, in Mercy Library. For a few minutes I had been utterly transported, outside time and space.
“I’m going to be dying tomorrow,” she said, between gulps of air.
She turned her head toward me. I had never seen her more beautiful.
I became obsessed with the trapeze. Over the next year I practiced whenever I could, with Mary and alone, staying past when the library closed, past when Mary slipped out into the night to meet various lovers or just to be alone with her thoughts, and her demons. Mary agreed to keep the bar suspended from the beams and even rigged a tiny hook to keep it pulled back and out of the way of library customers.
I practiced so hard that my muscles ached and I felt myself solidifying into a hard mass. My hands cracked and bled from twisting over the bar; sometimes I hobbled to the library in the morning—through the dead leaves, and snow, and spring foliage—unable to move my arms or bend my knees, my head still clouded from the dreamless sleep of the night before. I was like a raw wound but as solid as granite, the most substantial I had ever been in my life.
As time passed, my body changed in other ways, too, as if my body’s changing and Mary’s coming into my life were intimately connected. She influenced me in so many ways, anyway: I also began to carry around the scent of cinnamon and cloves, trailing it behind me and letting it wrap around me when I stood still; I began piling books on the library’s front desk, running my fingers across their spines as if they were cats; I lined my arms with bracelets, bracelets I was constantly picking off the ground as they slid off; I grew my hair, too, letting it swarm from my head and past my shoulders. Though my hair was straight and thin, I let months pass without brushing it so that, like Mary, I could claim tangles and knots and ruin my hair with combs whenever the occasion arose. Of course I would never really be like Mary. And I was never beautiful like her until I was in the air.
Maybe it was the way I took Mary into me that made my father look at me in a new light. One day when I was about fourteen, I was walking through the house absentmindedly, dreaming of the Velasquez Circus, when I felt the strangest prickling on my skin. It was like the moment when Mary Finn had sought me out in front of the courthouse, except that now I felt no dizzying excitement of love like I’d experienced then, only the uneasy and dismal sense that I’d been found out.
The living room was the same as always. I looked at the thin burlap sofa so uncomfortable that no one was ever found stretched out upon it, at the bowls of plastic oranges and pears decorating the windowsills, at the splintering, sagging floor, and, finally, at the rocking chair that moved back and forth like a little minnow. That was when I realized the chair was filled with two eyes as big as suns, crackling into my skin and down my flat body. That was when I saw my father, whose gaze pinned me to the spot, trapping me in that little burlapped room my mother had designed to the discomfort of us all. There was nothing natural about it: nothing natural about that house and my being there, and nothing natural about the way my father looked at me from that rocking chair not meant for his body or anyone else’s.
I might have thought I’d dreamt it or been carried away by all the crazy novels Mary had me read. I might have forgotten that sensation of shame rushing through me like blood. But that night my father appeared in my bedroom doorway, blocking out the light behind him. I stared at him, tried to figure out what he was doing, but I couldn’t make out his eyes in the mass of his body. The whole room was cast into shadows, and my father’s silhouette showed up jagged on my wall, like teeth.
“Father?” I whispered. For a moment I wondered if it was someone else, a stranger who’d broken into our house and come for me. I felt fear slide through my body in a cold rush. He was so large, looming there, much larger than he had appeared in the confines of the rocking chair.
“Who is it?” I breathed, my heart pounding. I looked to the bed across the room, but I could tell from the sounds of Geraldine’s snoring that she was fast asleep.
“Shhhh,” he said. Even with that hushed tone, I knew who it was, yet I had never heard such a soft, gentle sound come from his mouth. A sound that seared over my skin.
“Here, Tessa,” he whispered, reaching out his hand. “Mind your sister. See you don’t wake her.” I could have sworn he was smiling, but even as my eyes adjusted to the light I could not make out his features.
I dared not say no to him. I shook as I pushed back the covers and threw my legs over the bed, toward the floor. The wood was cold under my bare feet as I stepped down, and I stopped and pulled my arms around my shoulders. I could not stop shaking.
“Do as I say, girl,” he said, still reaching his hand toward me.
I walked in slow steps across the floor, my arms wrapped around me. He snatched my wrist in his palm as I approached. I glanced back—the room seemed strange, covered in shadow and dark. Geraldine was spread out on her mattress. Breathing slowly in and out.
I followed him down the creaking stairway, through the front hall, back through the kitchen. He held the screen door open for me and then I was outside, stumbling over grass and crops, dirt crunching under my feet. We did not speak. I barely even breathed as I walked on tiptoes behind him, and my mind raced with all the things I must have done wrong to make him come for me at night like this, without even waking Geraldine.
He grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the cornfield. The corn swished on both sides of us. He pushed me down onto the dirt with the corn swaying, hovering over me. The moon was out that night, I remember. The corn stretched in front of it like claws.
I closed my eyes and braced myself for his hands against my skin. When they came they were gentle, slow. I popped open my eyes, astonished. Wasn’t he going to hit me? Hadn’t I done something wrong?
“Quiet, girl,” he said, and I shuddered at the sound of his voice—so soothing, like he was talking to a cat. He crouched over me then and pulled up my cotton nightgown, yanked it over my head and pressed me down again until the dirt cut into my back, into bare skin. He spread me out under him, and his eyes moved over me, mocking.
“You’re a strange one all right,” he said, laughing, and then slid his hand across my breast. “Barely even a girl.”
I stared at the moon over his shoulder. The corn silhouetted against it.
Tears rushed down my face and I whispered “I’m sorry” again and again. I shivered in the dirt, expecting his hands to beat down any second. I tried to cover my bare skin.
He came down on me then, so heavy I could barely breathe. My skin scraped over dirt. Pain ripped and seared through the center of my body, through places I didn’t even know could feel. I kept my eyes squeezed shut. The smell of earth and growing things was as strong as if I’d been buried in it. I closed down, didn’t even flinch after a while, but my mind raced and flickered and the whole world seemed to be contained inside it. After a moment I imagined I could even see the girl being worked over out there in the dirt, under the corn, but I was so far away I didn’t even care. I kept my eyes shut and my mind zeroed in, focused on the trapeze, the feel of the bar in my palm. Air swept under me, split open on all sides. I felt myself soaring over everything then. The pain that ripped up through me, opening inside me like an obscene flower, was happening to some other girl’s body, somewhere else.
Afterward he picked me up like I was some sort of wounded b
ird and carried me inside. I kept my eyes shut as he washed the blood from my legs with a cloth from the kitchen sink. After carrying me back up the stairs, he laid me on my bed as smoothly as a dress you planned on wearing to church the next day. Geraldine stirred slightly but did not wake. When I finally heard the door shut behind him, I turned on my side and wept.
The next day I woke up feeling as if my insides had been scooped out and replaced with fire. Every part of my body hurt as I moved from side to side. I stayed in bed. I wrapped my hips in towels and paper to soak up the blood, and hid the soiled sheets underneath the mattress.
I thought of the library: Mary unlocking the thick wood doors, the line of people that would surely be waiting by now. It felt like a parallel life I had been dreaming about but had never actually led.
“What the hell are you still doing in bed?” Geraldine asked, glaring at me.
I closed my eyes and ignored her, and soon my mother was in the room, already covered in dirt and exasperated to have been called away from it.
“What is going on here, Tessa Riley?” my mother asked. “I will not have you jeopardizing that job.”
“I’m sick,” I said, looking at her dully.
“Goddamnit.” She shifted angrily, then caught sight of something, a dash of blood on the sheet. Her face became softer, almost the way it had been once, back when she loved me and thought I’d keep growing, back when she still tucked me in at night. Something inside me almost caved in right then.
“Well, well, you’ve become a woman,” she said. “A miracle.”
I looked at her then, and the feeling I’d had a moment before, that pinprick of longing, disappeared. Suddenly I ached for Mary so much it was a physical pain inside me. I wished I could will her to my side, wished I could ask her to explain the world to me. I winced, and shame seeped into every cell of my body at the thought of her knowing what had happened to me.
I stared at the ceiling. Later, when Geraldine perched herself on the side of my bed and made snorting noises to annoy me, I closed my eyes and imagined myself a million miles away, in Rain Village, with the rain pounding down over me and leaves sticking to my skin.
The next day I felt better but couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed and go back to work. I didn’t know how I would face anyone, let alone Mary. I was cheap, disgusting, like some old discarded thing. The power I had felt in my body up on the trapeze, practicing twirls and layouts, felt like some lie I had been told. My father had burrowed into me and brought out the truth: that I, Tessa Riley, was a freak, something monstrous. The kids in the square had known. He had known.
At my mother’s insistence, I went down for dinner that second night. My father behaved as if everything were normal. If it weren’t for the sharp ache in the center of my body, the image of the corn bent in front of the moon, haunting me, I might have thought that I’d imagined everything.
The phone rang, and I almost jumped out of my chair. We all looked to my father. The phone never rang in our house and was only there for the direst emergencies.
“Lucas?” my mother asked, her voice tentative, almost meek.
He continued eating, wordlessly. We sat there, and the air in the room grew heavy with his silence. The phone continued to ring.
“Leave it,” he said, after nearly a full minute had passed.
The next morning I pretended to leave for work and instead wandered through the countryside, climbing trees and spreading myself out in the fields. Alone, I could just go blank and dull, stare at the clouds until I felt like I was one, too, but even the sight of another human being—a farmer, from a distance—made me want to sob. I could not face anyone. All I could do was stare at the clouds and the sun and dream of flying.
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 ar
m, 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.
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