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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Shhhhh.”
It was as if the broken part of me had spilled out, and I wailed and twisted around, in the grass. Mary kept me bound up in her arms. The pain gnawed at my gut, strangled my throat. I thought of my mother and father and sister and brothers, of how much I used to love them, how hurt I used to be when they laughed at me, when they joked that I was a punishment from God. I thought of the other kids under the oak tree always looking and laughing, and the cornstalks bent in front of the moon, the feel of dirt against my back, the feel of my body and my heart and my entire self being broken down, erased and wiped out. How much I wanted, sometimes, to be wiped out, how Mary was the only person in the world who could fill me again, remake me into something new.
Slowly I became aware of a vague herb smell, a handful of herbs in my face and on my skin. The pain lessened. The broken-glass feeling in my gut numbed, then disappeared. I lay back and felt the words and images leave my mind, until there was nothing left except that moment, right then.
I opened my eyes and came back to earth, to the library, to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Everything is okay.”
I sat up, and my head pounded with grief. “Please,” I said. It was a terrible feeling, looking at her right in front of me, feeling her hands on mine, knowing how far I was from her now. I can never tell her, I thought. But as she watched me, it was as if she knew what I was thinking already, as if I had unleashed my whole heart there, in the garden, and she was holding it in her hands.
We looked at each other, and her cat’s eyes seemed to grow bigger and deeper, more dark, the way they had before. I felt a whooshing feeling through my gut, a tickling, and then a laugh whispered through me.
“You can’t let it take you over,” she said. “You are stronger than anything else, any of these people.” Her voice wrapped around me like arms.
I couldn’t speak, just stared at her and then at the ground.
“How about I tell you a story?” she said. “Would you like that? Something that happened a million miles from here, many years ago?”
I looked back up at her and felt relief wash through my body, tears start at my eyes. “Okay,” I said. I sat back and closed my eyes, let the last vestiges of pain slip away. The spice scent swirled around me. Mary leaned back and draped her arm around my shoulders.
“Once,” she said, “in a small Turkish village, there lived a man named Mihalis, who had a son named Costas. Mihalis had eyes the color of kiwis and bright black hair, just like his son.”
I pictured it: a man with hair like Mary’s, sticking out in every direction and as black as ink. My whole body released and let go, sinking into the grass.
“When the child was a year old, the father decided to leave the village because he wanted to teach his son to be good, and to teach him to live without love, as he had done. Mihalis set out into the world with his baby strapped to his chest. He walked and walked and never stopped to sleep. He wanted so much to be someplace new that his feet wouldn’t stop walking when he was tired but began to run, and he ran for six days from the love he’d never found, until he ended up in a barn.
“There the father and his son survived by eating sunflowers, cooking them over a fire. They spent every day lying in the sun reading the clouds and the books they’d brought. The child Costas learned about mathematics, jewelry-making, agronomy, homemaking, horseflies, and seeds. He learned to read as many languages as there are in the world, though he had no one to speak them to.”
I laughed at the idea, letting the story overtake me. Mary paused and laughed with me, touching my hair.
“One day,” she continued, “when Costas turned eighteen, Mihalis decided to return home to the village he’d left so long ago. He felt safe, convinced that he’d raised a child without love. But Costas was terrified of walking over the edge of the earth, and begged his father to stay. Mihalis tried to describe the wonders of people and other places, but his son could not understand. And when they left their home and Costas began to see other creatures like them, the boy was afraid and filled with delight when he saw that the world did not stop, but kept stretching before them.
“They had only been walking for two days when a group of young girls passed by them. Their bodies looked like fruit trees to the young Costas, who turned to his father and asked what these creatures were that made his stomach drop and his breath grow short. Mihalis turned to his son, who had stopped in the road, and saw his stricken face. He looked back at the young women and saw that one of them had stopped also, and was turned to his son.”
I was breathless, imagining it: the group of them paused in the rough, rock-ridden road, the girl’s deep black hair strewn with jewels and hanging to her knees, her sad eyes and the sand streaking her legs. Talk to her, I thought. I imagined her curving, parted lips. Go on. I imagined myself like a fruit tree, wearing sandals that revealed my toes.
“Mihalis remembered then the girl he’d run from. Her image appeared like a storm cloud over him. Mihalis had dreamt of Katerina every night for seventeen years, but the herbs that grew by the pond had made him forget every morning the dreams of the night before.
“What is it, whispered his son again as the girl walked toward them. Mihalis knew, at that moment, the waste of seventeen dreamless years; he thought quickly and replied, It is a kind of duck, and it will eat you. The son thought for a moment before he spoke again. I want one, he said.”
I looked up at Mary. “A girl can’t be a duck,” I said.
“It is all true, Tessa,” Mary said, “every last bit of it. Costas never returned to the barn after that. The world was too big.
“You can always leave,” Mary said then, looking right at me. “There is always more to discover, more selves inside you that just need to come out.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
She paused, then leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Now, why don’t you show me what you’ve been doing on this rope of yours?”
We went inside, and I hauled myself up to the bar, the shelves of books towering on either side of me. Mary went to help the few readers who had gathered while we were outside, then came back to me.
“You’re improving, Tessa,” she said, as I held my body straight in the air, with only my palms on the bar.
For a moment, I was tempted. I felt my muscles pulling, my hand reaching for the cable on the side of the trapeze. I could show her my new trick, release it into air.
“Why don’t I show you how to flip down?” she said, in the moment I spent hesitating. “I think you’re ready. And I can show you my own special trick, one of the things that made Marionetta so loved and desired.”
“Marionetta?”
“That was my name, up there, Tessa. Marionetta,” she said, stretching the name out until I could feel it wrap around me.
I forgot about the rope, my new trick, my hours by the river, completely.
She slipped off her skirt to the leotard underneath, then reached up for the bar. She smiled at me and started to swing. For a moment, as I watched her fly through the air, I imagined that there was only this, this moment, right here.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I remained closed in, as if I occupied two separate worlds: the world that my father stood over, a dark, secret place where the moon and the corn masked unspeakable things, and then my world, which was always Mary’s. I walked into Mercy Library each day, and the earth-pounding sun turned to mist. The smoke and the smell of cloves and cinnamon wove around me, and I began hearing the patter of rain, seeing the flash of fish out of the corner of my eye, feeling the swoosh of the trapeze under my hand. The force of Mary’s world was so strong that it even changed th
e air around her. What would it be like to swim in a river, I wondered, with rain sprinkling all around and fish sliding against your skin? How would it feel to spin five times in the air before dropping into a silver net?
And then I shrugged out of myself and those nights in the field and threw glitter across my skin and tumbled across the floor, as Mary danced and clapped. You could see a wildness in her still, left over from her days on the trapeze: her skin made for circus lights to bounce off it, legs that could curl past her neck and over her shoulders.
More and more I asked Mary about the places she’d lived before coming to Oakley, before she’d taken over the abandoned library on the outskirts of town and begun cataloguing the minutiae of all of our lives. I stayed at the library so late that my parents would be in bed by the time I got home. In the night I would sneak down to the river and practice, beating my body against the rope. I wound my body down to a spark of energy, so tight that I could fly out of the room, twist and disappear when my father came near me.
I began to imagine that other places and lives existed for me, too, places where I could become what Mary saw in me. “Rain Village,” I repeated to myself in the dark, and dreamt of floating boys with white skin. It seemed so far from the stark, bright fields of Oakley, the heavy manure scent that was everywhere, the swooping wooden house inhabited by a father who never seemed to sleep.
Most of all I dreamt of the circus: the sequined women with red lips who’d hang from ropes by their ankles, the men who could order a row of lions to walk on their hind legs, the flames streaming from men’s mouths, and the sticks a girl could juggle while hanging by her hair. Mary described these things for me again and again.
What Mary described was like nothing I had ever seen or heard of, and the one thing I needed was something to imagine, something far from home. She told me that after William’s death she cried for one year straight. Tears flowed from her eyes and down her face so constantly that tiny rivers of tears followed her wherever she went, and anyone who wanted her had only to look to the ground to trace out her path. She left Rain Village on a boat, she said, and then walked and walked through the country and into the little towns where she eventually became the stuff of legend: at night the townspeople would whisper to each other about the crying lady, and mothers warned their children to keep their windows shut at night, lest the crying lady climb inside and steal them away.
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