The Circus Rose

by Betsy Cornwell

  since, Bear has danced

  or played the beast

  in all our acts—

  though of course,

  Bear’s and mine

  are the best.

  My heart still holds

  its first sight of Bear:

  the looming, warm

  weight, dark as chocolate,

  lush and sweet.

  A warren of fur,

  a heavy

  embrace.

  A body that felt

  at once to me

  like home,

  even though I could see

  it was not home to

  her.

  Ivory

  Rosie used to turn old circus flyers into paper crowns for Bear. She’d place them carefully on his narrow skull and then cry when she took her hands away and the crown fell off.

  Every night, a paper crown, cut out while Rosie did her splits and stretches, her legs akimbo behind her while her hands fiddled with the scissors. Bear’s huge bulk made a brown crescent moon behind Rosie. When we went to bed, Bear would go into his cage, but that was really just to keep up appearances: Bear could work the latch himself, though that was a secret only a few of us knew. Everyone who had been with the circus more than a month knew how tame and devoted Bear was.

  Every night I watched Rosie and Bear from across the campfire, until, one night, I couldn’t stand it anymore. We were nine, and the circus was wintering down in the Sudlands, where the snow never came. The circles of caravans and tents where the cast and crew usually slept were empty; we all slept under the stars whenever we came this far south. I pushed myself up and stomped across the warm sand.

  Vera turned away from her two current paramours to watch me; the rest of the cast and crew were too busy savoring a little leisure time to pay any attention.

  “Here!” I said, snatching the scissors from Rosie and taking another flyer from the snowdrift of them that had just come off of Toro’s portable printing press.

  “Hey!” Toro cried, but I gave him the sweetest and saddest look I could—the one that Mama was always saying proved I had a bit of showboat blood in me yet—and he smiled crookedly.

  “Just the one, eh?” He sighed, turning back to his press.

  “I only need one,” I assured him, hoping it was true.

  I thought for a moment, picturing lines and shapes in my head, and then I folded the paper in half, in thirds, and in half again. I glanced at Bear to gauge the width of his head and cut out the paper’s center, then made careful slits and shapes along the sides.

  “Watch this, Rosie,” I said.

  I pulled open the folds with as theatrical a flourish as I could muster. It probably wasn’t very theatrical at all (no matter what Mama says, I just don’t have it in me), but thankfully my work did the amazing for me.

  It was an elaborate crown, with jewels and stars made out of negative space between its peaks and frolicking bears between the jewels.

  Rosie gasped with all the zeal of an infatuated audience. “Oh, Ivory, it’s perfect!”

  She lifted the crown in her strong, callused hands—acrobat’s hands, even then—and placed it delicately on Bear’s head. When she stepped back, it stayed balanced, as I knew it would. By folding the paper evenly, I had made the design perfectly symmetrical.

  “Now,” said Rosie with great contentment. “Now she is a perfect princess.”

  I frowned. “A prince, maybe,” I said. “Bear is a boy bear.”

  Rosie gave Bear a long, searching look. “Bear is a princess. Definitely.” She made Bear the same elaborate curtsey that she gave the audiences at the circus.

  Bear lumbered up off the ground and arranged his hulking body into the same polite pose in return.

  Rosie nodded resolutely, as if that settled matters. “Most definitely.”

  This rankled something that had been bothering me for a long time, but that, at only nine years old, I was still struggling to articulate. “Rosie, you can’t just . . . This isn’t the show. We pretend things there. Here, outside the big top, they’re—they’re not pretend. We’re not performing now. We’re real.”

  Mama told me so every night, during the private little bedtime talk that was just for me, after Rosie had drifted to sleep on the wings of a bedtime story. Stories had never been enough to help me slip out of the day. I needed to talk, seriously, about things I knew were true. Facts. How long it had taken to break down the tents; ticket sales; or any little thing that had worried my small, serious heart during the day.

  Mama always knew that. Always understood. And when the scarier acts in the circus frightened me, as they often did, she would hug me backstage and ask me to remind her what she told me every night.

  “We are what’s real,” I’d whisper, echoing her.

  “That’s right, love,” she’d reply, the same words every time. “The circus acts are just stories, pretty pretend gifts we make up because we like to give them, to make people happy. But the circus is not the real part of us. Who we are outside it—that’s who we really are. Rosie might be onstage now”—for even then, Rosie loved the spotlight and was a born performer—“but who is she really?”

  “My sister.”

  “And who are you, no matter whether you’re onstage or no?”

  “Ivory. Rosie’s sister. Your . . . your daughter.” I tried not to hiccup, tried to pretend I was definitely through crying.

  “And who am I, first and always and forever? Who is that?”

  “Mama.”

  “That’s right. More than anything, more real than anything, my cloud-haired babe. I’m Mama.”

  And I would nestle into a hug and feel her beard brush my forehead, and I would know exactly what was real. What was safe.

  Bear might be a princess or a prince or a dragon or a griffin or any number of dangerous beasties during the show. But here, at the fireside, at night, he was just what he seemed to be. Just Bear. So solid and sure, he’d become one of the cornerstones of my life. The circus troupe members came and went, Mama adored us but had so many obligations, Rosie went far away inside her mind sometimes, and our fathers never . . .

  But Bear was always, always there. And always Bear. Exactly what he was.

  I tried to be generous with Rosie, tried to remember how much she liked playing pretend. “Or a king. Yep. My crown is fit for a ruler.”

  Rosie’s lips, I was horrified to see, began to tremble. “Can’t you see? Can’t you see the princess?”

  I felt a knot tighten in my gut. I didn’t know why I was getting so angry. “I don’t want to pretend with you, Rosie! I made you the crown because—because I knew I could make a better one and I wanted you to have it and be happy, but I won’t—I won’t pretend Bear is anything but Bear!”

  My stomach hurt. My head hurt.

  Bear’s head cocked slightly to the left. He lifted one huge paw and held it out.

  I rushed into his embrace, grasping fistfuls of fur and letting my tears run into the ruff of his neck. “Just Bear, just Bear . . .”

  Faintly, I could hear Rosie weeping too. But that just upset me more.

  “Over here.” I heard Vera’s voice, and I knew she’d brought Mama back from our caravan, where she’d been doing design work with Apple.

  “Girls, girls, what’s wrong?” Mama said, her voice firm and authoritative. “My goodness!”

  “Rosie says—” I hiccupped, already embarrassed that I was crying over something so silly. “Rosie says Bear is a princess, and she won’t take it back.”

  Bear rumbled deep in his throat, a soothing sound, and he reached his other paw around Rosie. Mama came and hugged us too, and Rosie and I quieted, safe in the arms of the two beings we loved most in all the world.

  Rosie never did take it back, though.

  I learned to ignore her. She’d always carried her pretending a little farther than most.

  I never did. Never even enjoyed playing make-believe like other children. I think that’s why I learned to l
ove building so much and why engineering school became such a precious dream. I wanted to learn how things worked, to take them apart and rebuild them myself, so I could understand the inner workings of a thing just by looking at its outside.

  School was the exact opposite of a circus. No illusions. Just facts.

  After that night, I learned to keep a place inside myself that was just for me.

  Where everything was only what it seemed.

  Rosie

  What was the circus like, without Ivory?

  Was I some half a thing?

  It was never that way. My act

  has always been my own.

  The first day without her,

  true, was hard.

  A day on the road.

  No show, not even

  a rehearsal—just traveling,

  earthbound, no open-armed air to

  catch me, hold me, make me

  live. The first night,

  I was sure,

  would be harder.

  No sister to pillow

  my limbs with her own.

  Just one fourteen-year-

  old girl in a world

  all at once far too grown.

  Just a floor for a bed

  in a caravan

  so small Ivory’d called it the Tin Can,

  big enough now, my pretty,

  to swallow me whole.

  After that long

  still

  day

  just as long as a rope that you can’t quite

  reach—

  I found myself standing

  outside the caravan,

  that single lung,

  listening to the open-door

  silence turning to one

  set of breaths

  when I went

  inside.

  Mama gone

  for the night with Vera,

  meeting old lovers.

  I couldn’t bear it,

  to sleep

  alone that night.

  Ivory had a million schoolgirls,

  new transplants like her

  in a new garden

  and I was one Rosie.

  I still looked like me, and

  in the next show, I’d still be

  The Rose of the Circus Rose,

  perfect as my posters, but—

  it was my roots—

  my invisible roots, half gone—

  I couldn’t bear—

  But there was Bear.

  Bear in her cage

  still play-acting at being

  what everyone thought she was.

  They thought the cage was locked,

  thought Bear couldn’t release

  the latch with her clever nose.

  Bear knows.

  I crossed the quiet ground

  to the cage

  and slipped inside,

  not bothering with doors:

  a fifteen-year-old wouldn’t have fit

  but I could, just.

  The bars caressed my bones

  and I was through.

  Bear rose

  through the shadows,

  slow moving from sleep,

  hot as a hearth,

  throat-rumbling deep.

  Big enough for a girl of fourteen

  to hide in. Only just. And besides—

  two sets of breath, as soon as I entered.

  Tandem breaths.

  Tandem hearts, and if one

  was ten times my size,

  that was familiar, too.

  I’d always thought it wouldn’t take much

  to build a heart bigger than mine.

  And the open night air all around us:

  the same air Ivory had breathed all day.

  Some wind might carry it between us,

  the same breath,

  a sisterly kiss.

  The same breath

  she took as she read a book

  might pass my lips now, might lift

  us through the coming show.

  Bear here, and Ivory’s air.

  I felt myself

  blossom and breathe.

  Bear lifted one

  paw, still half

  sleeping, and I fit

  myself to earth again,

  so tired, I welcomed the idea

  of hibernation.

  Bear’s breath, so long

  it matched to every three of mine,

  deep as an ocean shell,

  deep as a cavern echo

  far underground

  where the roots hang down.

  3

  Ivory

  My time at the Lampton Girls’ School of Engineering was the happiest I’d ever spent, and the hardest. I’d felt such guilt, leaving for that year. I ended every letter I sent Rosie with an apology. When we were small, I used to tell her, lying quietly in the dark, that I’d never leave her as long as I lived. And while she’d released me from that promise long ago, while she’d encouraged me to go, I still knew I had broken my vow.

  It hurt me almost past bearing.

  Guilt over leaving Mama and Rosie clung to me every day, and it came back twice as strong if I forgot them in an hour of rapt studying or an evening of raucous dormitory laughter. I knew tuition was expensive, and I wasn’t a scholarship girl; Mama had told me only that she’d handle it, but I couldn’t imagine the sacrifices she must have been making to send me to school.

  I wrote long letters to Mama and Rosie every week—and though it made me feel a little silly, I always wrote a line to Bear as well, making sure to tell him what I was up to. And I sent my greetings to the rest of the troupe, of course. I was sure Mama read my letters to the group, and even though that made me feel strange, I couldn’t quite tell her not to.

  Rosie, though, I trusted to keep our letters to herself. So it was in these that I wrote to Bear and that I shared anything that wasn’t wonderfully positive; I didn’t want Mama to think I was having any trouble at all.

  I wasn’t having trouble, after all, not really. In some ways, the school wasn’t so different from the circus; everyone bonded quickly, though we were all different ages and from far-flung places. I had found friends easily, girls named Dimity, Rachida, Constance, Felicity, Faith—names I stored carefully on the tidy shelves of my heart. The school was just small enough that we could feel like a group, like a tribe; smaller than the circus, and quieter and more orderly, more studious. There were girls as young as twelve, but many were older than I, and plenty of grown-up women came to Lampton’s as day students to take classes in building or repairing the machines that made their lives run more smoothly. In many ways school suited me better. But the little troubles, the experiments or the quizzes I failed, the arguments that all teenagers get into now and then and that sometimes hurt more than I wanted to admit . . . those I told to Rosie, not to Mama.

  I even had my own bed all to myself. I’d never, ever had that before.

  Mama used to keep Rosie and me in the same bassinet, and after we got too big, the three of us slept on the rug on the floor of our caravan together. Mama kept buying props for the circus and upping the troupe’s wages, but she refused to buy a bed for herself. She asked us if we wanted them plenty of times, but we had never known anything else, and the rugs and blankets on the floor were more than soft enough for our pudgy children’s limbs.

  I’d see Mama stretch and wince waking up after a night on the floor with us, though, a problem that got worse as time went by. She tried a hammock made from an old curtain, but gave it up after one night, saying it made her back worse, not better.

  So I constructed a plan. I knew what I wanted to do for Mama, and I spent several nights plotting it out, half of another wheedling the stagehands for leftover timber, and a week or two building in secret, in the few spare moments any of us had.

  I presented Mama with her foldaway bed on the night of her fortieth birthday, when Rosie and I were going on nine. Rosie, who of course had been in on the plan with me, had collecte
d all the softest, smallest feathers from discarded costuming, and saved up to buy cotton batting to stuff the rest of a mattress that I sewed from faded, but still strong, tent canvas.

  When we gave her the bed, she gathered us both in her arms and wept into our hair.

  Within a month, her back had improved enough that she could do all her routines again.

  But here I go, looping back and back into the past, one memory reminding me of another and another. Schools, beds, Bear, Rosie, Mama . . .

  One return begets another, I suppose. And no memory is ever quite as you left it, no matter how carefully you lay it away.

  I went to Lampton’s, followed my heart as long as I could stand it. But at the end of the school year, I got a letter that made me know I could stay no longer: the Circus Rose was going on a tour to Faerie, and they would be gone, a whole continent away, for two years. Guilt was still eating me up as hungrily as it had done when Mama dropped me off in September. I’d left my twin twinless and my mother with one child (two, she’d say, counting the circus—but even so).

  It wasn’t as easy to leave school as I had hoped it would be—nearly as painful as leaving the circus had been, in fact. Dimity, Rachida, Constance, Felicity, and Faith tried to convince me not to leave, citing the projects we’d planned to tackle, as if all it would take was a sufficient amount of fun promised in the future for me to stay. I couldn’t make them understand exactly why I had to go home. They each had families they missed, but it wasn’t the same somehow. School was where they were supposed to be. The circus was where I was supposed to be.