“What do you see?”
Just then the door wheezed open, and a beautiful woman appeared in front of us. Her hair was long and pale, and she had black-lined eyes the same blue as Mary’s, but shaped like large almonds. She was older than I would have thought. I had always pictured her as a little girl, I realized.
“Yes?” she asked. Her eyes fixed on Costas. “Do I know you?”
I frantically tried to remember everything Mary had said about her.
“I am Costas. I am your nephew. Katerina was my mother,” he said. “I’ve come back here to find you.”
Her face had a stunned expression. “You look more like Mary,” she said, finally. Something broke on her face when she said Mary’s name, I noticed, and then slipped past. “Where are you from? What happened to Katerina?”
“She ended up in Turkey and Greece,” he said, “with my father. I never knew her. She died soon after I was born.”
“Ah,” she said. Her eyes didn’t move from his face. “Katerina and Mary looked alike. Mary is my other sister, you know. I took after our mother more, I guess.”
She was silent then, taking him in, looking right through me where I stood in front of him in the doorway.
“You are very beautiful,” she told him, finally, “the way she was.”
I looked up at him, twisting my head behind me, and was surprised to see the expression on his face. He was staring right back at her, fascinated. Something was happening between them, I thought, and suddenly I felt queasy.
“My name is Tessa,” I said, holding out my hand to her. “I knew Mary when I was a girl. She lived in my town in Kansas.”
When she looked to me her eyes were so blue they didn’t seem real. “You knew her?”
I was about to respond when she seemed to catch herself suddenly and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please come in and sit down.”
We followed her through the hallway and into the living room. She was stunning, wearing a bright silk dress even though she was alone, her body slim and slight, but she seemed much less vibrant than Mary. It’s this place, I thought. A large fireplace cast a glow over the room. The house smelled of smoke and wood. Outside, the rain pummeled down.
“Please sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the old-fashioned couches. I smiled politely at her, but she just looked back at me. The couch was like a slab of stone.
“Mary was a librarian in my town, when I was young,” I said, as she sat across from us. Her chair fanned out behind her like a peacock’s wings.
“A librarian,” she repeated, as if she were feeling out the word. “She always loved books so much.”
“Yes,” I said. “She taught me to read, and to love words and stories.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at me as if Mary had come to life again for her, just for that second. “How is she? Is she alive?”
“She died,” I said, “some time ago.”
Isabel took in the information, her face blank. She leaned back into the chair. I was surprised at how uncomfortable I felt with her, and with being in the house in general.
“I tried to find her, you know,” she said, after a minute. Her voice was much lower now, sad. “I wrote letters to her, but I never knew where to send them.”
I looked over at Costas, who was staring at her, rapt. He must see himself in her, I thought. His whole past and future. It seemed crazy, suddenly, that he and I had taken the same journey at all.
“Mary told me all about this place, all about growing up here.”
“Then you don’t know anything.” She looked right at me, and I was surprised by the harshness of her look. Then her face softened. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. “I think I have some biscuits, too, if you’d like.”
“We’d love some,” Costas said, before I could answer. I could have slapped him. “Let me help you.” He jumped up chivalrously and helped her to her feet. She led him out of the room, smiling back at him.
I shook my head and looked around. The fireplace crackled, spit. A large family portrait hung above it, I saw then. A mother and father sitting on two formal chairs, with the three daughters standing at the mother’s side. My heart twisted up inside me at the vision of Mary as a child, the same age I’d been when I’d first met her. She was at the side of the painting, resting her hand lightly upon her mother’s shoulder. Much older, Katerina stood behind her. The two looked almost identical except that Katerina’s hair was stick-straight and Mary’s tumbled down her breast in a mass of dark curls. Isabel stood to Mary’s right and looked only slightly younger. She and the mother had the same pale hair, finer features. You could see that Katerina and her father carried the same haughty expression.
I wondered what was in the rest of the house. What Mary’s room had been like. I thought of Riley Farm with its acres of cornfields and grass. The way the cornhusks flared up and curled over themselves like claws. That was all part of me, I thought, the way all of this had stayed inside Mary.
Isabel and Costas came back into the room, laughing together as he balanced three steaming cups in his hands and set them on the coffee table, pushing one toward me. He looked up and winked at me. She seemed much more at ease, which made her even more beautiful in her pale, slender way. I could only imagine how he’d charmed her with a phrase or story, his kiwi eyes.
He was about to sit when he noticed the portrait. “My God,” he said, walking up to it. Isabel glanced at me and then went to stand beside him.
“I don’t know why I keep that up,” she said, “when they are all gone. Yet I feel as though something terrible will happen if I take it down, even after all these years. I haven’t touched anything, really.”
“I understand,” Costas said. “I take photographs. I won’t ever destroy a photograph of someone.”
I stared at them, how beautiful the two looked together. I almost felt the way I had the first time I’d seen Mary walking toward me. Awestruck. Isabel’s pale, moonlit hair hanging down her back, her hips curving under her gauzy dress. Costas’s dark hair folding over his black collar. He was having as much of an effect on her as she was having on him, I saw, and she kept looking up at him, her face warm and open. I felt smaller than I had in years. It was strange how it could still come up on me, that feeling of being a freak. I sank back into the couch.
Costas asked Isabel about her father and mother, about what his mother, Katerina, had been like when she was young. I tried to focus, but it was all so much. My mind went back and back to those moments on the river, with Mary and William together by the water, what might have happened just before it had taken him from her. I tried to remember everything she’d ever said about it, but all I could think of was her face that day she’d told me she couldn’t leave Oakley. I am marked by fate, she had said, for what I have done.
“What did you do?” I whispered. It all came down to that, I realized. I was so close to her, it. I didn’t need to know anything more.
Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets now, smearing the windows. I could see the forest through a strange watery haze. What would it have been like for her, growing up in this house, sneaking out at night to meet someone like William? I felt a shadow come over me and almost jumped, but it was only the light shifting. Costas and Isabel were deep in conversation.
I stood up. “Do you mind if I look around?” I asked, interrupting them.
Isabel turned to me. She seemed taken aback.
“If you don’t mind,” I added quickly. “It’s just that Mary described this house to me so many times.”
She relaxed. I realized she was a woman always slightly on edge with people, whereas Mary had been so sure of herself all the time. “Of course,” she said. “Go ahead. Look in her room if you’d like. It’s at the end of the hall. We never touched it, you know. We always thought she might come back. At least, my parents did. But I always knew she was gone for good.”
I stood and watched her for a second. I wanted to ask more, but she had already tu
rned back to Costas. I watched her lean her body into his. I couldn’t deny the stab of jealousy moving through me and berated myself for it. This is not about him, I thought. I slipped up the winding staircase, ignoring the dust that rose up around me as I moved over the carpet, trying not to feel self-conscious. They weren’t paying any attention to me, anyway.
As I moved through the upper hallway, which was covered in flowered wallpaper and cloudy mirrors that hung in a row, I looked into each room: the ornate canopies, shelves lined with dolls, the busy wallpaper. Dust seemed to coat everything. There was something not quite right about any of it, about Isabel living in a house that felt crumbling, barren, frozen in time. I passed what had to have been Katerina’s room, the parents’ room. At the end of the hallway, I recognized Mary’s room right away. The piles of books, everywhere. The ornate red quilt covering the bed. I felt my whole body clench.
I stepped into the room tentatively, as if I expected her to pop out at me, a specter telling me to stop disturbing the dead. But it was empty. It felt empty, like a room in a museum. I spent several long minutes touching every object, trying to imagine what each thing might have meant to her. I picked up a small jewelry box with a ballerina on top, opened it and saw a girl’s silver bracelet, a little bird pin with carved feathers, a gold ring. Was there something of her left in any of this? I thought of my old room in Oakley for the first time in years. Geraldine snoring on the other side of the room, the window that looked out over the fields. There was nothing of me in that room, I thought. I had only passed through it, as if I hadn’t been there at all.
I could hear the rain funneling through the gutter, making a hollow whooshing noise. I walked to the window and tried to lift it. It took a moment to get it to budge. I closed my eyes, imagining her before her life was marked by tragedy and regret, when everything was open to her. The window slid open, flinging dust everywhere, and the scent of rain burst into the room. Or had she just been anxious, I wondered, waiting for her one chance to escape, find something new?
The room felt hushed, strange. Rain slammed onto my hands, which rested on the windowsill. I closed my eyes, trying to will myself back home to that day by the river, her voice in my ear and the grass blades rubbing against my back. Twisting her curls around my fingers as she spoke. I wished more than anything that I could go back in time. What were you trying to tell me? I would ask. What was happening to you? I could remember the way the weeping willows looked hanging over the river, the way the grass had that warm summer smell to it.
You cannot escape your fate, Tessa, or where you come from, she had said.
My mind strained against it. Maybe there is no secret, I thought then. Nothing to find. Maybe her lover died and she could not find happiness in the world after. Couldn’t it be as simple as that? Whatever happened, could it really matter now?
My head hurt. Mary, and then my father, and then Mauro—it was all crowding my vision, swooping through me like the wind that had brought Costas to the circus and led me here. The pain of loss and memory passed into my gut. I thought of my father and a rage came up from deep inside me. You took me away from her, I thought.
I threw her jewelry angrily back into the box. How could the memory be so fresh after so many years? No matter how far I went, how much I succeeded, it was always this. This anger, this loss. Everything circled back to it.
I felt I had grasped nothing, trying to piece together who Mary was, why she had drowned herself in the river, why she had picked me out of the crowd and seen something in me that no one had seen before.
I walked to her bed, bent down, and rested my head on the quilt. I breathed in, imagined the imprint of her body on the fabric. How could I get any closer to her than this? No matter what I found in Rain Village, it couldn’t change the fact that she had left me, that I could never get back to her, never love or know her more perfectly than I had. It could never change what my father had done to me. It could never change that there had been a sadness in her I couldn’t understand.
I might never learn the truth, I realized. But even if I could whirl back in time and stand right there next to her as she confronted her fate, standing by the river on that long-ago day, it wouldn’t change who Mary was. What she had meant to me. What I had lost when she left.
When I finally dragged myself back downstairs, it felt as though hours had passed. I thought how hard it would be to get back to the hotel, through the tangled wood. The stairway was so dark I had to feel my way down the banister, into the dim light of the living room.
Costas and Isabel sat side by side on the couch, barely looking up when I entered the room. She was telling him stories, I realized, about his mother, about his grandparents, and as I walked toward them he looked up at me.
“Tessa,” he said, “are you okay?”
Isabel stopped midsentence and followed his gaze. “You miss her,” she said simply, her expression suddenly serious.
“Yes,” I said. I was crying. I brought my hands to my chest and realized the whole front of my shirt was wet with tears.
“I still miss her, too,” she said.
I wiped my face, sat in the chair she had occupied before. I looked at Isabel. Her hair glimmering in the dim light. Her blue eyes focused on mine, sparkling out at me. This must be hard on her, I thought. Learning so much in one day, having the whole world come hurtling through the front door after all the care she’d taken to keep it out. I looked at Costas. It seemed clear then that this was what he had come here for. To be with her, to help her. I wanted to remind him of his wife and son, to tell him not to forget them, but it hit me, right then, that he had left them long before now.
My heart ached. I thought of Mauro, missed him so much it was actually as if a part of me had been cut out.
I turned to Isabel. “Do you know what happened that day?” I asked, finally. “What happened between Mary and William on the river?”
Her face changed. I was surprised at the sadness there. It was clear that she carried grief within her, and now it was all right at the surface. In this old house, surrounded by dust and bones, the rawness of it was almost absurd.
I leaned forward. Met Costas’s eyes and then looked back at her. It didn’t matter to him in the same way, I thought. Knowing what had happened.
“Well,” she said. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, bringing her hand to her face. After a moment she tried again. “I haven’t spoken about Mary in years. All I remember is how wild she was that night. Wild with despair. I remember her and my father yelling. Him calling her names, her screaming back at him. I remember lying under the covers in my room with my hands over my ears, willing it to stop. And then she was just gone. I felt like it was my fault, as if I’d willed her away. The house was always quiet, every day after.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “She spoke of you, you know. How much she missed you.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
Her face lit then, and I told her everything I could remember Mary saying about her. How smart Isabel had been. How terrible it had been to leave her behind, how Mary hadn’t had a choice.
The way she had left me, I thought.
“Thank you,” Isabel whispered, close to tears. I felt thankful then that I could give this to her.
“Did William give Mary a ring?” I asked, suddenly inspired. I didn’t need to be there anymore, I realized. In Rain Village.
“Yes,” Isabel said. “An opal ring. He said it would bind her to him forever.”
“The peasant girl,” I said.
‘Yes,” she said. “That old story the old folks tell. Mary always liked those stories; she was always repeating them to anyone who would listen.”
I smiled at her, genuinely then. “I’m going back to the village,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
I looked at Costas, but knew he didn’t want to leave. I had no idea what would happen to him. All I knew was that the Velasquez Circus was in the last weeks of the season and would b
e in the South by now, in Mississippi or Florida or some other state with trees that dripped and dangled over swamps. It seemed strange to think about the planned-to-the-minute schedule of the circus train and caravan, when in Rain Village it felt like time had no meaning at all. But the circus was the world I knew. My world.
“I’ll stay just a little longer,” Costas said, smiling at me softly, wistfully. “Can I meet you back at the hotel? Will you be all right?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine,” I told him. I would miss Costas; he was something like a brother or a best friend.
On my way back down to the river, the rain had let up and the moonlight guided me. Something had shifted, and the evening was so bright I had to squint when the trees parted and the light shone directly in. I leaned against a tree and took Mary’s ring from my pocket, holding it in my open palm. I had considered, briefly, giving the ring to Isabel, but I thought the last thing she needed was to be bound to the past more than she was already. We had enough burdens, I thought, all of us. I couldn’t save Mary, I couldn’t change a damn thing, but I could do one thing more.
The ring sparkled and exhaled in the moonlight. I followed the soft path Mary must have walked down hundreds of times before. The ground was wet at my feet, covered in leaves.
When I reached the river, I knelt on the muddy bank and stared into the water. The moon had clouded over, making it difficult to see.
A terrible, piercing longing moved through me. An ache so powerful I could only clench my teeth and wait for it to pass. I bent toward the river, and it was just at that moment that the moon shifted, lighting the surface of the water so that it looked like glass.
I leaned forward, my heart in my mouth.
It was her, unmistakably, on the surface of the river. Mary Finn, just as I remembered her. Her cat’s eyes staring out at me, her long black hair so wild it was like a field of weeds, her silver hoop earrings dropping to her shoulders. Her brown, freckled skin. Her lips the color of coral.
I felt a radiance inside me. A sense of pure light. “Mary,” I said, reaching out to the water.
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