I don’t remember how I came to be right there, next to her, reaching for her as if I were the one who was drowning.
Once she was on the ground, I could see plainly how her body was filled with water. I watched the men pump down on her breast and breathe into her mouth. I knelt by her. I stroked her forehead and pushed back her hair. Leaves twisted through it, and I thought back to her stories, the ones she had told me over the years. I had the strangest sense that I was hearing the tale from Mary’s lips. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the vibration of her voice humming in my ear.
“And then she drowned in the river.”
With Mary’s head in my hands, her black coiled hair wrapped around my wrists like seaweed, I couldn’t see straight. My heart was a blinding light in my chest, blank and searing. I couldn’t believe what was happening, yet it was true down to my core; the world had already shifted for me completely. Sometimes, when tragedy enters a life, it can feel like something that has always been there. For me it was as if everything in my life had moved, and had always been moving, toward that moment.
As I held her there, I suddenly noticed a bright spot on her breast. I looked to see if the two men had noticed, but they’d turned away to give me a moment with Mary alone. I leaned into her face until her cold forehead touched my skin. I trailed my fingers down her neck until I felt the thin chain that circled it. On the end of the chain I felt a ring, which I pulled from the dress surrounding it and brought into the light. The light hit it, illuminating the tremendous colors that can only be hidden in an opal stone.
CHAPTER NINE
The world became completely silent. Even the water Mary floated in seemed to have turned to ice. The last leaves on the trees, so bright and furious the moment before, seemed as dull as paper. I felt the most crushing sense of emptiness I had ever felt, and when the others came to stand over Mary’s body and carry it away, I could not even see them lifting her from the slick, leaf-covered ground. I stumbled along as they carried her to the doctor’s house, and let the townspeople pull me away when the doctor put a blanket over Mary and passed the palm of his hand over her face. I vaguely remember hands on my shoulders and head, murmurs of compassion, but I was blind and dumb that day and for many days after. It was as if every breath of air, every drop of light, had been sucked out of the world at once.
Eventually I ended up at home, very late that night, I think, and my grief was so heavy that the house immediately filled with it, causing my parents and sister and brothers to take to their beds with fevers and sadness. I lay and stared at the wooden slats darting across the ceiling, unable to move. Geraldine snored next to me, her throat catching in her sleep, and the sound was like a hacksaw in my ears. I stared at the ceiling for what seemed like days, closing my eyes and just feeling the whoosh of air, calling back a sliver of the fantasies I’d had about Mary and me in the circus. My illness and grief were so severe that even my mother started coming into the room, yelling at me to get up or lying down next to me to comfort me. It was as if the grief had awakened something primal in her, and she began tending to me the way she would have once, back when she had convinced herself that I was almost normal. She mashed up potatoes into a paste, brought in fresh milk straight from the barn and forced it down my throat. She kissed my forehead, and I thought about how happy that would have made me once, before Mary had given me the world, before it had fallen apart again. Even Geraldine tiptoed in and out of the room, in keeping with the strange hush that had fallen over everything.
But it was harvest time, and the crops had no patience for such grief. Mary’s death was the biggest thing that had happened in years, I think, but there was no time for it, as much as everyone spoke and dreamt of Mary, imagining the water filling their own lungs and skin. While my family returned to the fields, one by one, to work from morning till night, I stayed in bed. It took many days for my own fog to begin to lift, and that was when Geraldine told me that Mary had been buried behind the library.
“They said she couldn’t be buried in the local cemetery,” she said, “because she died in sin.”
“Sin?” I repeated, dumbly, though I knew well enough what she meant, had heard my mother whisper the word outside my door. “Suicide,” she kept saying, in the same hushed tone she and her lady friends had always used to talk about Mary Finn.
“Matt Tompkins’s kid watched her,” Geraldine said, looking down, running her palm back and forth along the doorframe. “He watched her wade into the river by herself, and just stop and sink down into it. He had no idea what was happening.” She looked up at me and then down again.
I imagined it then, Mary sinking into the river, and it felt like a scene I remembered from somewhere. The memory beat against my head and skin, struggling to come into relief.
“Matt Tompkins found his son crouched down, holding on to a tree, crying. By then you were there, he said, and some others, pulling her out of the water. He said you didn’t make a sound.”
“The poem,” I whispered.
“What?”
“A gleaming shape she floated by / dead-pale between the houses high.”
“Tessa, are you okay?” Geraldine asked. I looked up at her and was surprised by the worry that crossed her face, how soft she seemed then.
“She read me so many stories,” I said, choking on the words.
“I know,” she said. “I saw you sneaking off to read the books she gave you. I saw you hiding them under your mattress.”
“You did?”
“Sometimes I would look at them.”
“She didn’t belong here,” I said.
I had the sudden, crazy idea then that I could still steal her away, take her body and bring it back to Rain Village, bury her in the forest, by the river. She had never belonged in Oakley, I thought. I was so strong by then, my whole body powerful and muscled; I could carry Mary across states, I thought, through Colorado, Idaho, up to the Pacific Northwest, where she had told me Rain Village was located. Just the two of us moving through the world, like I’d always imagined.
I clenched my eyes shut, pulled my knees into my chest, and felt like I, too, was being put into the ground behind the library, the chain tangled around my neck, dirt piling up on top of me. Guilt seized me like two massive arms and kept me pinned to the bed, gasping for breath. I just could not think of it: her body in the river, the way we’d pulled her onto the bank. The air itself turned golden with it, heavy like syrup. I saw Mary, again and again, sitting next to me that day on the riverbank, talking about the fate her tea leaves had spelled out for her. Warning me.
“Tessa,” Geraldine said, and I could hear my mother then, appearing at the door, feel them leaning into me, but it was as if I had vanished, as if I had never been there at all.
I woke a few days later and found I couldn’t bear to stay in my bed a moment longer. Outside, the sky was a pale, smoky gray, and a wind seemed to push through the trees, through the cornstalks, making them sway and shimmer. The world seemed to have been emptied out. The branches pressed into the sky, cutting through it with thick black lines, and there was no sound except for the faint whistling of wind. I lifted the window a crack and pushed my fingers through. The air felt like ice. It was December already, I realized, nearing up on Christmas. At Mercy Library Mary would be brewing cider with cinnamon sticks, baking gingerbread in the tiny stove. On any December day you would find an array of farm folk, their cupboards filled with canned vegetables and jams, their cellars stocked with dried meat and mounds of potatoes, spread through the stacks and at the tables with collections of Boccaccio or Baudelaire or the Brontë sisters open before them, breathing in Mary’s spice scents. I thought of all those mornings when I had looked out onto a world just like this, barren and raw and ghostly, and felt filled with life, because of her.
The house seemed unusually empty, quiet. Geraldine’s bed was unmade. I had that strange feeling again, like I had vanished completely. Like I didn’t even exist. I touched the windowsill, the f
ine layer of dust that had collected on it. I touched the pane of glass and watched the imprints of my fingertips slowly fade out. Outside, the corn swayed back and forth, dried out and ragged in the winter air.
I realized then that I needed to go back. I needed to go back to the library and take what I could of her, to prove that she had existed, that we had existed together. I pulled on a sweater and pants and boots, I couldn’t get them on fast enough, and then I took off, slamming down the stairs and through the front door, past the hedges my father had attacked that strange, ancient morning, onto the road that ran into town.
Mary, I breathed, into air, and she seemed to flare up before me, with her straw basket full of vegetables and books, her dangling silver earrings, and her long skirt that trailed behind her as she walked. “Mary!” I called, and I could just see her there, in the distance, her head flung back, laughing, calling to me. Smoking a cigarette with a book open on her lap. Swinging on the trapeze, whooping with laughter. Floating on the river, her wet hair sticking to her skin.
I flew through the town square and past the lumberyard. I didn’t care that I was making people stop in their tracks and stare, or that the cold seemed to slip under my skin, turning my body inside out. I just needed to get back to her. I lived so much in books, I thought, it was hard, sometimes, to tell what was real. I remembered all the times Mary had read me stories and poems and the entire world had seemed to drop away. How many times I had watched the moon, the dirt scraping into my legs and back, and imagined I was in medieval France, or Victorian England, or, most often, in Rain Village, which had sometimes seemed more real to me than anywhere else. How afterward it would take me several seconds to calm down, to come back to the world again. Maybe none of this is real, I thought. Maybe it is all just stories.
My feet thudded against the earth; my breath was so loud it blocked out every other sound. I stopped only when I saw Mercy Library looming before me, and then I stood before it and took it in. The sign creaked back and forth the way it always had, and the old wooden building rose up like an old ship. Nothing seemed different from the way it had before, not really, though there was no one around. No couples crouching around the corner or groping each other under the front stairs, as the town folk were all too likely to do when Mary was there, weaving her spells over everyone. I don’t know what I’d expected to change, if I thought the whole place would have burnt to the ground the moment Mary lost her breath. That was exactly what I had thought, I realized. It didn’t make any sense for the library to continue standing, or for me to be there before it, staring up at it with my hands buried in my pockets. Nothing made sense anymore.
Slowly I walked toward the front steps, listened to the familiar creak as I walked up them. “I’m here!” I said then, into air, and I almost expected the main door to open and a whoosh of heat and gingerbread to come wafting out to me. For her to be standing in front of me in her long skirt and heels, her hair blackly wild around her face. “Did you like this story?” she would ask. “How real it felt? The best stories always feel more real than your own life.”
“I’m here,” I whispered, again, pressing my hand against the door, willing her to come to it. Surely she was there, in some form. “Mary?” The wind blew across my face then, shuffling through my hair, and I closed my eyes. “Is that you?” The air calmed, and all I could hear was a deep rustling sound, the shaking of tree branches above me. A weird feeling passed over me, and I started to realize how absolutely alone I was out there. The library in front of me like a corpse.
I shook the feeling off and tried the door. I had come to this library hundreds of times, I told myself; it was just a place like any other place, a place I had known and loved and spent the best hours of my life in, my only happy times. I straightened my back. The front door was locked, so I made my way around the library, past Mary’s herb garden, to the back door. I dug at the base of the strongest rosemary bush, and the silver key was there, where it had always been, covered in earth. I heard a tapping sound then, and I found myself looking up, looking for her at the door, my heart lifting, and I realized that I expected her to be there, asking me to hurry inside because there were customers waiting, or because she’d made us some pumpkin soup and rye bread, or because the library was empty and we could practice a bit during the lull. I could almost see her in front of me. If I squinted, she would be there.
I sank down to the ground, into the herbs. The pain seared through my body, like nothing I had ever felt or have ever felt, before or since. Mary Finn had left me. I would never see her again. And I was not prepared to live a life without her. I knew then that I never would have left Oakley while she was still there. Not even to forge a life of my own, not even for the circus, as much as my love for the trapeze and the rope burned inside my body and made me long for something new.
Suicide, they’d said.
I picked myself up from the ground and unlocked the door, pushing my way into the library. Past the stove and the jars of dried herbs, through the stacks, past the tables where she had done her readings, up to the front desk with its trinkets, the silver bracelet and the scattered notebooks, the cigarette papers and the clown figurine. I stood still and closed my eyes. The library was completely silent. Empty. The feeling came back: that the whole world had stopped existing and that I, too, had vanished. It was a feeling I was getting accustomed to, a far more comfortable feeling than the pain that beat up against me and threatened to break through at any moment, dropping me to my knees, taking away all my breath.
I thought of the millions of stories pressing against each other in the library stacks. So many lives and feelings and tragedies. This doesn’t matter, I thought. None of this matters. There were countless other stories to wrap my head around, weren’t there? Like Sister Carrie’s? The girl who had gone to make a life for herself, who had started in the factories and ended up rich and feted. Just focus on that, I told myself.
I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could but found myself thinking, for the first time, of the river.
Not how she picked herself up from her mattress, tied on her shoes, and walked those few minutes down to the bank. Not what she must have thought as she stood there, staring into the water. Whether she saw her own face staring back at her, or William’s face floating on the water, or if she saw another river, teeming with pink fish and rain. Whether she thought of the ice that had covered her skin, Juan Galindo coming upon her as she lay in ice-streaked hay. Whether she thought of leaving the circus, coming to Oakley and to Mercy Library, coming to me.
What I thought about was the feeling she must have had when she felt herself slipping, when the water moved into her mouth and lungs and the water plants twisted around her legs. The way she must have given herself over to the water and felt herself sink into it, become part of it, felt her mind go blank and soft. I stood there by Mary’s desk, imagining it. How the water would feel against my own skin, curling into my mouth. How if I allowed it, if I chose it, I would never have to be without her. Never have to go back to Riley Farm. Never have to lie back in the cornfield staring at the moon, or run past the kids in the town square and hear them laughing. Never have to be the freakish, strange girl with hands shaped like starfish and as small as plums. Never have to face my own life. The river was only steps away. I wondered if Mary’s feet had left indents in the earth, for me to follow.
I let my mind wind down and stop. Concentrated on the feeling of the water, what I imagined it would be like. Let my mind let go of everything in the world but that feeling, the emptiness of being so far below the earth and air.
I focused so hard on the blackness, the silence, that I stopped smelling, hearing, feeling the faint chill against my skin. I stopped feeling myself at all, and it was then that I saw it. A twirling, tiny shape, a speck really, in the center of all the darkness. Flicking back and forth. Getting closer and closer. Filling up my mind until all I could see was a perfect image of a body whirling around a white rope, cutting cleanly thro
ugh the air. It took me a minute to realize that it was my own body I was seeing. My own body covered in sequins, stretched out in a smooth, gleaming line, moving around and around, unaffected by gravity, unaffected by anything of this earth.
I opened my eyes and realized there were tears running down my face.
I felt it, deep in my body.
“You need to make a life for yourself,” she had said.
“Far away from here,” I said out loud, finally realizing what she had meant. “In the circus.” The room seemed to spin around me. I could walk into the river, I thought, or I could live in the air. Spin in the air until I became pure light, until I transcended everything. Suddenly the desire moved through me so strongly I almost cried out, and all the muscles in my body seemed to break open, all at once. It was a strange feeling. I thought of wings lifting up and spreading in the air, expanding and unfolding and opening out, and I thought of Mary in the brochure from the Velasquez Circus, a spinning blur of light as she flew through space.
I ran through the stacks to the back of the library, my heart in my mouth, my feet storming across the wooden slats, and I pushed the stool out and leapt up on it, then reached for the trapeze. I curled my fingers around the cold metal. The moment my hands touched the bar, everything felt different. I had a place, I thought, beyond Mercy Library and Riley Farm. As I pulled myself to my feet, gripping the ropes with my hands, I knew I had made a decision.
It’s what she had wanted, I thought. What she had seen in me. What she had given to me.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TEN
It is strange, how people drop out of your life, like tears. The way the whole world can shift and change, the way you can choose to remake it. Choose to become someone new. When I left Oakley, Kansas, I was only sixteen years old, but it seemed so long in coming that I might as well have been fifty. I had never stopped longing to be a part of my family and my town, no matter what, but it was too late for that now; it was too late for a lot of things, and my heart was so chock-full of grief and love and hope and wildness that I thought I would burst with it. As I walked into the ice-cold night, under the black sky sprinkled with stars like sharp diamonds, I thought of Mary, all those years before, heading out into the world, leaving everything she’d known behind. I remembered that first time I’d left my house and taken off running for the town square, determined to find something more in the world.
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