She lived off the vegetables she stole from farmers, she said. Once in a while she would think of settling in a town or village, but who would hire a woman with a steady stream of tears falling down her face? One time a shopkeeper actually did let her spend a day folding boxes in the back room, but when he saw the pile of boxes that night, perfectly folded but soaked through with tears and falling apart, she was fired on the spot.
And so she kept wandering until, soon enough, the winter came. She had nowhere to go and began shivering at night, when all she could do was try her best to warm herself in piles of hay and straw. Soon even the straw was specked with crystals of ice and snow. The teardrops froze right on her face; icicles hung from her hair.
But unbeknownst to her, not everyone who heard the story of the crying lady turned away in fear. Some lit candles for her, some prayed to her, and some trekked through the snow trying to find her. Some tried to interview her for their magazines, while others proclaimed that she was a hoax, or the devil. But one man, Juan Galindo of the Flying Ramirez Brothers and star of the Velasquez Circus, thought only that she would make a fine addition to the circus sideshow, and Mary, for her part, couldn’t have agreed more.
Juan found Mary curled up in a haystack, outside a town famous for its strawberries and loose morals. As he came upon her he gasped: the tears had all turned to ice that streaked her face and her clothing and hair, and her dark eyebrows were sprinkled with frost. She was as pale as the snow that coated the fields. The ice shone and gleamed on her skin and caught the light until rays of colors came off it. When she shifted in her sleep, the ice clanked and tinkled against itself. Juan knew that the woman in the hay would draw crowds in the hundreds. The tears were like diamonds on her cheeks. He gazed at her, and later he would tell anyone who’d listen that he’d never seen anything or anyone so beautiful as Mary right then.
But the moment Mary woke up and saw Juan standing over her, with his dark skin, burning eyes, and the black mustache twisted into a slight curl on either side, she stopped crying once and for all. Her body became so warm that the ice melted instantaneously, and her pale cheeks became rosy and bright. Her heart beat like drums in her chest.
“At that moment,” she told me on the library floor, “I knew William was dead and gone forever.”
Juan Galindo watched in horror as Mary’s entire body flushed with an unbearable desire. The dollar signs that had been floating in his head vanished along with the tears and the ice, until all that remained was one ordinary girl, lying in wet hay. Juan’s plans for Mary were over before he’d even had a chance to hear her speak, and in sorrow and disgust he turned back toward the night.
“Wait!” Mary cried, and pulled herself out of the hay. “I’m coming with you.”
And there was nothing Juan could do to stop her.
I often thought about Mary walking away from Rain Village to find a new life, and it was around the time I turned fifteen that I really started thinking about leaving my hometown, too. I became convinced that I could persuade Mary to go with me, that she felt as trapped as I did. I began to have long, elaborate daydreams about us traveling the world together in the circus, flying through the air, hearing the crowds roar, and meeting wild, fascinating men like Juan Galindo who would make the sky turn pink, they were so dazzling. Sometimes I laughed out loud, imagining such a glamorous life, and I’d emerge from my daydreams feeling groggy and dazed, heartbroken to be back in the world once more.
The more I fantasized about the circus, the crazier it seemed to me that someone could ever leave such a life, especially to come to a place like Oakley. There are better worlds than this one, I thought. How could Mary not agree, when she was the one who’d shown them to me? By then I could do one hundred one-armed swing-overs. In the silver box I had hidden downstairs, buried in one of Mary’s boxes of leotards, I had three years’ worth of savings—well over two hundred dollars.
It took me several weeks to get up the courage to talk to Mary about my plans, but on one particularly hot day, when we closed the library at lunchtime to gather strawberries and then wash them in the river, I took a deep breath and released all my hopes into the air.
The river was lined with weeping willows that hung and dipped into the water, and we dunked the strawberries in before biting off the stems and popping the fruit into our mouths.
“Mary,” I said, looking at the juice-splattered grass I’d gathered up in my hands, “I want to join the circus someday, maybe. Do you think I could?”
I was afraid she would laugh at me, though I should have known better. I always should have known Mary better than I did. She threw a strawberry stem into the river and looked over at me.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”
“You think I can do it?” I asked. “Could I be a flyer?”
“You are a flyer already, Tessa,” she said.
“Come with me,” I said, my heart pounding. “We could go together, to Kansas City.”
I could not even look at her. The seconds passed so slowly I was sure that time had stopped. I pressed my fingertips into the earth.
“No,” she said, finally. “You have to go alone. I cannot leave here, Tessa.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why not?”
She would not answer. After a long pause, she said, “I know what it’s like to feel trapped, like you do. You should leave before something happens. Something bad happened in Rain Village, Tessa, because I stayed too long.”
“Come with me, then,” I said.
She reached out her hand and placed it on mine. “I’m sorry,” she said, quietly. It felt like I was pressing against glass.
“Why can’t you leave?” I asked again. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t think I can explain it to you,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just not enough. The world is larger than you can even imagine, but sometimes it just closes in on you until there’s no room left.”
“But why did you come here in the first place? Why here, out of everywhere? Why can’t you leave?”
She hesitated for several long moments. When she finally spoke, the words seemed heavy and ill formed in her mouth. “I heard about Oakley once,” she said, “after a show we did in Kansas City. Someone talked of a town out west that was cradled by hills and ripped up by farmland. I kept asking questions, and the more I heard, the more I was sure it was the place for me to rest in. I was so tired then, Tessa. I could not stop thinking, and remembering, and I was just beaten down. I had visions of people following me, hunting me down. When I found out about the library and how it was just sitting here, I knew I had to come.”
“But why here? I don’t understand.”
“I hope you don’t ever understand, Tessa, what it is like to be so tired of life.”
I didn’t understand anything at all. “But why are you tired? Why can’t you leave now?” I let the grass drop out of my hands.
“I just can’t do it, Tessa. It’s in the cards, and in the tea leaves.” She laughed at herself, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all. Something was happening in her that I couldn’t see or touch. “Back in the circus, the fortune-tellers always avoided me; they could see what was coming. I can’t help it, not now: I am marked by fate for what I’ve done.”
My heart welled up inside me as I felt the world slamming shut. We stayed there, quiet. I stared out at the water, and at the weeping-willow branches hanging down and grazing the water, and thought that there was nothing else for me in the world—just this, forever, until I grew old and gray. And then I felt tears rising within me like a flood. Suddenly my body was wracked with them, and I opened my mouth wide and cried out every bit of grief in me, every shard of hope that I had taken out during the long nights in my parents’ house to comfort me while Geraldine snored in the next bed, while my father stalked through the fields. It was then that I came the closest I ever came to telling Mary about my father. I felt the words bubble on my lips but I did not say them, just let the tears stream do
wn my face. A moan rose up from deep within me, and I howled and cried and whimpered, let Mary cradle my head in her lap and stroke my hair.
“Tessa,” Mary soothed, “it is a burden, being young. I know it. Young, with the weight of family pressing down on you. But you will find your way in this one, Tessa. I just can’t do it with you. But you, you need to do it. To go. You need to make a life for yourself, my child, far away from here.”
I looked up at her and realized her eyes were wet, that tears were running down her face. It was the first and only time I saw Mary cry, but I hardly paid attention. I was so furious, and afraid, that I could barely see straight.
“You aren’t even my friend!” I shouted suddenly. I pulled away from her and leapt to my feet. “I hate you!”
I did not even think to ask what it was she had done, what the tea leaves had told her, what it was the fortune-tellers had seen.
Later, when I thought back to those moments, I would always wonder if Mary knew, even back then, how things would turn out.
The past remakes itself in hindsight. By now I can barely trust myself in my own life—I am so haunted, each moment, by the idea of what I will remember, what I will see when I look back, all the things I am failing to see now.
I should have known there was something wrong when Mary began closing the library in order to walk down to the river with me and spend long afternoons telling me her stories. People left angry messages on the door, having walked miles out of their way to catch a glimpse of her, smell her spice scent, or find out what herb to sprinkle in the dinner to make their husbands more kind, or passionate, or dull. But suddenly she didn’t seem to care. It seemed strange, too, I guess, that she told me so many new things that last summer, down by the river. That she talked so much, all of a sudden, of Rain Village and its pink fish, which writhed through the river and brought tourists from all over to sample their meat, and that her heart turned so often to William and her terrible, pounding sense of loss over his death. “He should not have died,” she would say, her voice so tight and full I thought she should have been screaming. One week Mary and I went to the river every single day, and, when we returned to Mercy Library, she didn’t seem to care about the notes on the door, the stack of books, magazines, and papers the mailman had left on the step. She just left them sitting there.
I barely took note of any of those signs, though. I was lost in my own fantasies. The yearning in my gut was so strong—the crazy excitement when I imagined leaving, the terrible fear when I thought of being alone, somewhere new, without her.
That summer seemed to last longer than usual. It was nearly October before the air began to crisp, the leaves started dropping onto the ground and into the water, and the air filled with the smoky, nostalgic scent of autumn. The sky grew gray and heavy and seemed to tap my head as I rushed down the road to Mercy Library, to help Mary rake the furious leaves that blanketed the library yard. The little chimneys of the houses I passed began sputtering wisps of smoke into the air, and Mary made crackling fires to heat bowls of apple cider with cinnamon sticks floating on top.
It had always been the perfect season for her. As soon as the leaves turned we pushed cloves into the skins of oranges and lined the windowsill with them. She put out bowls of nuts that we cracked into piles of shells and dumped into the yard out back. Mary sat at the desk and told me stories about her mentor, the trapeze star Lollie Ramirez, who could see into the future and had tried to warn her brother Luis before he fell from the wire and onto his neck in front of two thousand people.
“She could see it. She could hear him falling before it even happened,” she said.
The days grew shorter and I left Mary’s earlier, trying to get home before the night was completely black, spooky that time of the year on the empty roads stretching between farms. “I can’t bear to watch you go back to that house,” Mary would say, holding me close. “I’m so sorry, Tessa.”
“It’s okay,” I said, to reassure her, but she would watch me as if I were about to disappear.
As the days got colder, I’d return in the mornings and Mary wouldn’t be in the main room or out back. People would be lined up at the door, and I’d let them in, check out their books, and try to keep everything running smoothly. But more and more they had to fend for themselves, and every evening there’d be piles of books all around, scattered on the floor and in front of the books lined up on the shelves.
I’d run down the stairs to the cold basement to wake Mary, shivering with only a thin sheet wrapped around her, and see that she’d been going through her circus box—the paraphernalia, old costumes, jewelry, and love letters, which she wouldn’t let me read. I’d put the things back, fold the box flaps over each other, and set it to the side. I’d start a fire in the little stove and wake Mary with a cup of cider.
“Thanks,” she’d say, sitting up and raking her hands through her mass of curls.
“Come,” I’d say, “let’s go outside.”
Autumns in Oakley were magical. From some parts of town all you could see, for miles around you, were leaves on fire—red and yellow and orange, flaring from the trees and coating the ground. Mary was tormented by something—I did not know what—from her past or present, but that autumn all I wanted was to lose myself outside among the colors, to not think of anything else. I sought anything that would pull me outside myself. I could not stand my father, just walking past him in the mornings in his rocking chair. I dreaded the nighttime and hated my body with more passion than I ever had, unless I was on the trapeze. One afternoon Mary dragged herself from her bed and came out with me, wrapping herself in a sweater.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and she turned to me and smiled the crooked smile that lit up her tanned face, bending her blue cat’s eyes into arcs.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, “I’m just tired. It is you I’m worried about, Tessa.”
“But nothing’s wrong,” I kept insisting, my mind full of the circus, the trapeze, the feel of my body rushing through air. And I did not even pay attention as she slipped away.
It was cold and gloomy as I walked to the library one day in late November, tromping through piles of wet, dead leaves. The trees were all skeletons. I couldn’t find Mary anywhere. I let in a few farmers who were standing impatiently at the door and left them standing, confused, in the main room. A cold kettle of tea sat on the stove, Mary’s mattress downstairs was empty, and she had boxes of memories, more than I’d ever seen before, spread out along the floor of her makeshift room, mixed in with the papers and books. I searched every room. I knelt down and began straightening up her things, waiting for her to return. I picked up her shimmering costumes. I arranged her high-heeled shoes in the box, running my fingers along the length of them, and started gathering up a pile of circus programs to stack on top.
When I finally looked up, I realized it was way past lunchtime. My stomach was grumbling. Where was she? I stepped over the mess Mary had left—I had barely managed to clear a foot of empty space on the floor—and looked once more around the other rooms downstairs and the front and back yards. Shouldn’t she have left a note or something? I walked back into the library, stumbling over the boxes and shoes, ignoring all the farmers wandering around aimlessly, books in hand. It struck me then how strange it was that she had taken all these things out after years of never touching them—all the clothes and papers and bracelets and shoes.
I don’t know what it was that led me to the river. Maybe I had some kind of premonition, the way Lollie Ramirez had had before her brother fell from the wire, or maybe it started to hit me that something wasn’t right in the way Mary had been acting, or in the way Mary had ever acted, burying herself in Mercy Library in the middle of a farm town like Oakley, leaving the circus and her home and her sisters, everything that had ever meant anything to her. Maybe I was a bit haunted, too, by the image of William in the river, pale and floating, and the girl who cried so many tears that they turned her skin to ice. A horrible thought came to
me, that I had lost her, right then. It was the oddest thing; I just put the thought out of my head and kept on running.
I ran until I could see through the trees, and then suddenly, from the hill where I stood, the whole thin river lay before me.
What I saw first was the bright color on the river. I thought it was some sort of fish floating on the surface until I recognized Mary’s long and brightly patterned dress. It was the dress and colors I had watched deepen in the sink out in back of the library a dozen times, watching Mary knead it in the water and lay it out to dry. I knew how the red and the orange and the silver smeared together under the water, that it was like staring into a dark, blurred sun. I knew how the colors were muted in the daylight, dry, and how the fabric rubbed against the paleness of her ankles.
I saw the white of Mary’s face—then her chin turned up to the sky, her dark hair spreading around her. Everything passed so quietly. It was only after a few moments that it struck me that something had happened, though, in a way, I think I had always known it, just as I had always known I would never see her again once I left Oakley. It is why I haven’t left already, I realized. I moved down past the trees and toward her as two shouting men, who seemed to have just come upon her, pulled her from the river. Careful with her as they pulled her to the riverbank, they lifted her from the water as if she were a child. It was all wrong—them moving and breathing and going red from the effort, and her lying there, blank and dull.
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