Rain Village

by Carolyn Turgeon

  “How do you feel?” Costas asked, turning to me.

  His voice caught me off guard. I turned to him, surprised. I looked up at him, then flicked my eyes quickly away. “Terrible,” I whispered. “Heartbroken.”

  “Are you sure you want to come?”

  I nodded. “I need to do this,” I said. There was no question: Rain Village might as well have been my destiny, my pull to it was so strong.

  We bought our tickets and boarded a northwest-bound train an hour later. Over the course of the day we watched the land go from dry and dusty to green and lush. I had so many questions, but my head was muddled. I kept imagining Mauro getting ready for the evening show, moving across the wire as if he were walking on air. I couldn’t pin down what I was feeling: heartbroken, yet detached somehow, as if the only thing real was the clanking and rumbling of the train beneath us. I closed my eyes, let the steady clang of the wheels soothe me to sleep.

  The next morning Costas’s face was the first thing I saw. It jolted me into the present. I turned to the window; flowers began coating the fields the train passed through, and a light breeze whipped through the train car, fluttering through my hair and clothing. We rode silently. It made no sense, but I knew him. Our longing and sadness formed a bridge between us. In my years with the circus I’d been surrounded by huge, heaping families sprawling across the lot, families who passed their gifts from one generation to the next. Costas knew what it was to feel adrift and alone in the world, no matter what places you found, from time to time, to rest in.

  We stayed on the train for two days. We slept sitting up in our seats, our bags propped on the seat next to us. When I woke that second morning and saw his face right there next to mine, I thought for a fierce, crazy moment that I was back in Mercy Library, the sun slanting in through the windows as Mary and I sat by the front desk, stamping people’s books and drinking herb tea. I felt a deep, sudden sense of being past pain. As I focused in on Costas’s face, his beauty, his eyes, there was sadness and guilt and love and desire all at once. It was intoxicating, strange. The past raging back to life. What am I doing? I thought, again and again. But Rain Village lived inside me, moving me toward itself like some undertow pulling me out to sea.

  I sat back and stared at the changing landscape, the giant trees and the distant sparkling snow, and thought how everything before this moment seemed like something I’d dreamt. I thought of Mary, how she had left the circus, too, for reasons I’d never understood. Did she feel this same way, anchorless and suspended? Did everyone feel it who left one place for another? I thought of the glitter-covered girl on the trapeze, dangling from a rope, spinning like a windmill in the air while the audience counted each turn and waited for her to fall. I thought of my father carving our hedges into the shapes of animals while Geraldine and I watched from the porch. I thought of being hunched over a sewing machine in Kansas City, and the only thing that seemed real was the glass pane in front of me, the faint smudge blocking my view of the passing towns. I pressed my hand against the glass and stared at the starfish-shaped imprint it left.

  “What was she like?” Costas asked, late that night. I blinked my eyes open and turned to him, saw the pale green of his eyes in the dark. “You call her name in your sleep; did you know that?”

  “No,” I whispered. I wondered if I always had, if Mauro had simply never told me. Costas smiled encouragingly. “Describe her,” he said.

  I looked at him for a moment and then thought back on all those moments, every single moment I had spent with her. With Costas there next to me, I felt safe. I thought of her rasping voice, her laughter as she swung through the air above me or steadied me with her strong, ring-covered hands.

  “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” I said. “Around her everything was different. Everything.”

  He smiled and closed his eyes. I was grateful that I could talk to him about Mary without my heart splitting in two. With Costas my life seemed so rich, so bound up in myth. Mauro had Mexico and his raging history, this wonderful larger-than-life family he had taken me into. I had Mary and the river, her hair coiled wetly around her neck. Whispers and secrets, like Costas had.

  “She came in and wrapped everything in mystery. It was like one of the piñatas the circus kids have on their birthdays. The way the world turns over, is almost too much to bear when all those toys and coins and candies come raining down.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at me. “I know what you mean.”

  I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to spread myself bare, everything that was wounded and scarred and ugly. Things with Mauro were so pure and soft, soothing. Mauro healed and protected me, made me forget the past, sink into the present. I worried that I had failed Mauro, that I was failing him now. I thought of Mary then, and suddenly I felt in my blood how utterly I had failed her. I had shut myself away, let myself drift away from her until there was barely anything there. I hadn’t even shared the swing-over trick with her. I had left her alone in that library, to her demons.

  “Well,” I said, breathing in. “When she died, I felt like everything she’d given me was gone. As if she had taken it all away from me. I never even thought about why she did it; I just knew that the one person I had, my one friend, had left me. And everything else back then, it was so miserable. All the time. Even talking about it now I just feel blackness.”

  “What was wrong?” he asked. “What was so bad?”

  My father’s face loomed down, the memory of his callused farmer’s hands flipping me over, rubbing into me, opening me up. Me washing and washing and washing in the river water, when it was through. Closing down until I could barely see the world around me. I thought of Mary. Back then I’d been so dazzled by her; I always should have seen her better than I did.

  “My father hurt me,” I said. Tears broke over my face, and tore me up from the inside. “From when I was twelve till the time I left home.”

  I could feel the words hanging there before me, as if they could push every molecule of air out of the car. When a long moment of silence had passed, I looked up at him. I could almost imagine I was setting things right, saying now what should have been said before.

  “Did she know?” he asked.

  I was disoriented, could barely breathe. “Who?”

  “Mary. Did she know?”

  I was about to shake my head when I remembered her face. You can always leave, she had said, again and again. There are always more selves inside you that just need to come out. She must have known, I thought. She must have felt all that grief and shame; I must have worn it on me like a banner. I remembered running to her covered in bruises, the day she finally set up the trapeze for me and gave me my first lesson, though she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t ever wanted to face the past, I thought. She had always turned everything into stories.

  “Her father, too,” Costas said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Her father. Katerina said that their father molested them, too. First her and then Mary. That is what my father told me. He said that Kate-rina was the woman of his dreams but that she was all twisted up and broken inside. Always running from Rain Village and longing for it at the same time, to set things right.”

  A strange sense of vertigo swept through me, and I clutched my head, squeezed my eyes shut. For a moment I felt like I was that girl again, sitting in front of the courthouse, wearing my father’s hands like a brand on my skin. I was innocent then, but it must have been there the whole time. That mark.

  Suddenly it was impossible to pretend the past was something separate from what I was. Costas brought something with him that cut through the power of the circus, made me suspicious of the way it transformed pain. Made me suspicious of the stories Mary told, of the lights and the spangles and the glitter, the Ferris wheel going round and round. Made me suspicious, I realized then, of Mauro, too.

  I couldn’t stop the guilt that came over me then, that horrible sense that I had failed Ma
uro, and Mary, and everyone. That I could have saved her.

  As we made our way north, the trees expanded and grew so tall we could see only the trunks from the train, giant pillars whole families could fit into. I sat back and stared out at them, the snow you could see glittering in the distance. I remembered how giant everything had felt when I was growing up, how my parents and sister and brothers had seemed to tower over me, to fill up whole rooms. “Look,” I said to Costas, pointing to the trees.

  “It’s like we’ve entered a fairytale,” he said.

  He leaned back and I smiled at him. “I wonder what Rain Village is like,” I said. “She always made it sound so magical.”

  The sun caught his eyes and lit them bright green. Suddenly I wondered how different my life would be with someone like him. It seemed astonishing, sometimes, how much the world could change, depending on where you were and who the person was next to you. I imagined what my life would be like if I lived in Turkey and Greece, had hair thick with salt.

  For a second I thought Costas would kiss me. His face was so close to mine. His eyes moved down my face, to my lips. The light shifted then, and I saw my face in the window behind him. His eyes went dark again, and I turned away, swallowing. Don’t lose your head, I thought. It would be too easy to think I was someone else.

  Hours passed in a strange sort of haze. Costas slept next to me. I looked back out at the landscape, watched it become green, luminous. My thoughts returned to Mary, to what I was trying to find. We were in her world now, I realized. After all this time. As the train crossed the countryside I could practically see the clear air turn to mist, the ground become soaked with water. When we started heading still farther west, the whole world lit like an emerald, and the trees seemed to tap the sky.

  I wondered if this was what Mary had seen when she’d left Rain Village, tears streaming down her face and trailing out behind her: these trees, this falling rain, these little towns that seemed equal parts wood and mist.

  “Why did your mother leave Rain Village?” I asked Costas in those endless hours as we sat side by side staring at the wet landscape. “Was it because of her father?”

  “I only know what my father told me,” he said. “I never knew her at all, you know. But she said her father beat her and hurt her and that no one said a word about it. And that one day she finally left. She wandered all over the world, he said, before she and my father fell in love.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “One day right after I was born, she walked into the ocean and kept on walking.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, breathing in. “That’s terrible. She drowned? Like Mary did? Like William, too?”

  “I guess,” he said. “William?”

  “The one Mary was in love with. The reason she left.”

  He looked confused. “I don’t know about William,” he said. “What happened?”

  “I just know that he drowned. That Mary was in love with him and he drowned, and she left soon after, went out into the world. I don’t think she ever went back.”

  “It is a hard thing,” he said, “to leave the place you come from.”

  I thought of Oakley, the tree in the town square, the hedges that lined our yard. For a second I wondered if he was making fun of me. I looked up quickly, but he seemed to be somewhere else completely.

  “You must have a lot of guilt,” he said. “To drown yourself after that. You know?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess so.” I was embarrassed to have never thought of it and looked down, tapped my foot on the seat in front of me.

  Of course Mary had felt guilty. Every time I thought of her, she seemed to take on a new shape, a new dimension. I wondered if it was ever really possible to know someone else.

  Day moved into night, and rain pounded against the train-car windows, hammering and beating down, never letting up for a minute. By the time we arrived at the tip of the country, it seemed like we would never see the sun again. The rain pounded down and the sky was like a sheet of rock as we boarded a small bus that would take us to the riverboat, the one Mary had described, and at long last into Rain Village. Time shifted and took on a new form. I had no time to gather my thoughts, but the world was always like that: no matter how much you prepared for something, there was always that moment when you had to leap off the platform and fly toward the catcher’s hands.

  The bus was quick, and soon a strip of blue revealed itself. We pulled into a small dock. The sun poured onto the water like melted butter. The air seemed different there, somehow. Costas and I walked down to the water—quietly, as if we might wake something. We looked down and saw fish as big as watermelons. Trees circled the riverbank, and the leaves hung heavy with sunlight, casting a spell on the water.

  She has been here, I thought. I could feel her presence. I imagined Mary leaving Rain Village so many years before, her tears falling in the water, the memory of William burned into her heart and breast. She would have walked from the riverboat to the dock and into the world for the first time. Right here. Soon Juan Galindo would find her, changing everything from that day forward.

  I looked at Costas, my eyes filling with tears. “It feels like we’re at the end of the world,” I whispered. As if we were about to step off it. I thought of Mauro and the trapeze, of circus lights and glitter and the elephants’ swaying trunks, the tigers’ soft fur, the crazy banners and colors of the sideshow, the sawdust and cotton candy and miles of faces staring up at us with astonished, blissful expressions, and wondered once again what I was doing in this huge, lonesome expanse where time seemed to have stopped. The rain seeped through my shirt, ran down my skin.

  “I know,” he said, grabbing my hand. His touch comforted me. I hadn’t realized how rigid and tense I was.

  When a boat appeared down the narrow path of the river, it seemed like a mirage. It shimmered through the leaves and rose straight up into the sky.

  We stood together and watched the boat approach. It pulled to a stop with a heavy, wheezing groan, sank from our weight when we stepped on the deck. The captain took our bags and fare quietly before heading back to the helm. The few other passengers didn’t seem to pay us much mind.

  I don’t know what kind of journey it was, really, that brought Costas and me to Rain Village. It did not feel like we were traveling the way a boat travels through the water; rather, we seemed to move the way a dream passes from loss to memory. I was inside the vision I’d had, when I’d first seen her, and Mary’s voice whispered in my ear. Was I a child again, listening to one of her stories? I sat on the deck of the riverboat, leaning my back against the railing, and the wood under my hands felt like the planks that made up the floor of Mercy Library.

  The rain pattered against our skin, onto the deck and the water. The air was so delicate. Looking above me, I saw the rain lit up by the sun, and the leaves overhead were like petals, almost translucent with the sun coming down through them. I looked over at Costas, watched him change the film in his camera, lift the camera to his face. He’s documenting this, I realized then. He wants to get it all down. I thought of Mary standing in Mercy Library, surrounded by files and books.

  We moved slowly down the river, watching the plants and trees and water, and then, in the distance, we saw people waiting on the shoreline. A burst of color in the melancholy landscape.

  “Rain Village,” I whispered. I climbed up on the railing and held the top rail with my hands.

  As we approached, I saw that the people were wearing shiny hats that kept the rain off their faces. I glanced at the other passengers, saw a woman with long hair so black it was like a pool of ink I’d dip a quill into, standing along the railing, waving. She glanced at me and smiled. I smiled back, then tilted my face up to let the mist of rain coat my face.

  The boat bobbed on the water as we anchored at the bank, and the fish thumped against the sides of the boat. “Look at them,” Costas whispered, pointing.

  The captain helped me down from the boat; my hand re
ached for the railing and my skirt grazed the water as I slid onto the riverbank. I stepped forward and nearly fell. When I took my second step my foot felt more assured, the mud less slippery, the riverbank more steady. I could feel the place closing over me, could almost smell the spiced oranges, feel the brush of dark coils of hair on my skin.

  Our feet sank into the ground. We walked up the riverbank and onto the earth above it. People milled around us and headed toward a path lined by trees. I saw the woman from the boat, watched as her galoshes navigated the muddy paths effortlessly, as if she were walking barefoot over cement. She ran to a tall man and hugged him. His hair was the color of peanut shells. When his eye caught mine, I turned away, embarrassed.

  I recognized other people from the riverboat moving alongside us, caught snippets of conversations about their trips. Costas smiled down at me and I thought how right he looked, being there. His long coat, his thin gypsy body. His eyes were the colors of the leaves drifting all around, hanging from the trees like feathers.

  We began walking with everyone else, down a path surrounded by trees. The world, the trees, everything around us was so lush. Vibrant. Soon the path opened onto a street, and Costas and I stopped in our tracks to take it all in: the twisting street lined with stores, people everywhere, the treetops jutting over the buildings like knife tips. The soft, glowing colors, the pinks and yellows and greens like hard candy piled in a bowl. I looked into the distance and saw small houses, their tipped roofs pointing to the sky.

  We moved into the street, stepped up on the twisting sidewalk. Every block or so there was an opening between shops, revealing a path to the forest.

  “We’re here,” I breathed, suddenly seized with joy.

  The thrill of being there—seeing it all right there, straight from her voice and into the world—overtook me, made me mad with pleasure. I couldn’t drink it all in quickly enough. We passed a clothing store with bright jackets hanging in the window, a candy store lined with bins of licorice and chocolate. We passed a small grocery store crowded with people, several of whom met my eye as we went past and then quickly looked away. Many places sold fish, or rods and tackle, shimmery fish-shaped lures. One store only sold the rain hats I had seen people wearing. A tiny inn sat at the end of the street, like something from a fairytale.