I continued to practice in the basement until I collapsed into bed each night, exhausted. Days and weeks and months passed. I worried and waited, wondering if my life would ever truly begin. And then finally, after a long, blistering summer that baked the sidewalks, well into an autumn that sprinkled leaves over the city sidewalks and streets, news of the circus finally came to Kansas City. From a fourth-floor window of the factory, I saw posters splashed across buildings and lampposts, even in that lonely part of town. The name Velasquez Circus burst above tigers, trapeze stars, and elephants with sequined harnesses on top of their heads. At first I thought I might just be imagining it, I’d been waiting to see that name for so long: Velasquez Circus, which seemed to contain everything within it. I was dizzy with excitement.
“Look!” I shouted, pointing. “I’m going to leave with them.”
All the girls left their machines and ran to where I stood, pressing in toward the dusty windowpanes, craning their necks to see. I turned to a girl next to me, who looked down at me with wide, surprised eyes. “I know the trapeze. I learned from a famous aerialist. I’m going to do it!” She backed away from me, and I could hear the others whispering, laughing, but I didn’t care. Flying Lollie appeared again and again in the posters, her hair glaring red and flowing out behind her, her skin coffee-colored and outlined in dark blue. “Flying Lollie, Dream of the Circus!” the posters screamed. The leotard she wore was made up of thousands of tiny yellow points, and she always lay flat across the bar, her arms spread out on either side like wings.
I didn’t even hesitate. That day I told the foreman I was leaving and collected my pay. I gave Esther a week’s notice and spent every waking moment stretching in that basement, jumping up and down in place, practicing my one-armed swing-overs and forcing my body to fling out from the rope in a clean straight line, with nothing to hold me up underneath but air.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I remember my last night in Kansas City as if it were yesterday. I packed my bag, left the boardinghouse, and camped out beside the railroad line on the outskirts of the city. I was suspended between lives, between my grief and the freedom of being out on my own, about to have my greatest adventure. I pressed my starfish hands on the cold railroad tracks, feeling for rumbling. I lay on my back staring at the moon, remembering those nights when I first learned to read among the cornstalks and those nights, a little later, when my father changed the meaning of those fields so completely. Now I was seventeen years old, free of the burden of family and of love, lying next to a line of tracks and staring at that same yellow moon. Everything was open to me.
The night seemed so full and strange, and to stretch out forever. Dirt and gravel pressed into my back. I stayed awake for hours, despite my exhaustion, imagining what I would say and do, how I would find Flying Lollie and tell her about Mary, about everything I’d learned and done. I closed my eyes and imagined Mary was there lying next to me, that I could reach up and wrap my fingers in the coils of her hair. “I am finally here,” I whispered. “Can you see me?” I felt a breeze pass over my face and sat up, sure I could smell the faint scent of cloves. “Is this how you felt, too?” In the distance I could see the outline of buildings stamped against the sky. I was afraid to breathe. I closed my eyes again and felt the edge of her skirt brush my leg, her hair curl around my finger. Eventually I fell into a deep, dream-filled sleep, my body curled into a ball next to the tracks.
I woke to the sound of voices and rumbling. I jumped to my feet, confused and disoriented, and saw that people had begun gathering behind me and were rapidly lining up on both sides of the train tracks, for miles in each direction. That was how it seemed—like we stretched out for miles. I gathered up my bag and looked around, as if I would see Mary there, waving to me from the other side of the tracks, the sun lighting up her face, her eyes glowing bright blue. Instead I saw crowds of people, more people than I’d ever seen in one place. My heart fell a bit to be back in the world, but the world seemed to have changed completely. The air was heavy with waiting, longing. Children ran through the crowds, and the people surrounding me took out binoculars to see into the distance. I looked in the direction they were facing, listened as the rumbling on the tracks grew louder. For a moment I felt raw fear press into my gut. This is it, I thought. If not this, then I have nothing. I closed my eyes and imagined my body cutting through the air like a steel blade, slicing through skin and bone and this mass of people until it was just me, swinging up to the canvas and back down again.
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the color. A mass of sequined colors coming toward me, sparkling under the sun. I saw the trunk of an elephant, the flash of a trombone, and the whirl of the feathers that drifted from hats, capes, and boas. Children cried out with delight all around me, and I found myself crying with them, rushing forward to meet the parade. Confetti whirled in the air. It did not feel real, any of it. I was caught up in something nearly holy, no longer myself. As the parade and train moved forward, I moved back, as we all did, to clear the tracks and make space. I felt the crowd of people behind me as I moved, the whir of noisemakers spinning through the air. Everything blurred together, and I opened my mouth and shouted, amazed that I could be invisible in the midst of all those people. My head reeled with it. What I saw next were the colors draped across the performers’ bodies, the shocking pinks and oranges and blues. I remember the green and silver of the gilded wagons rolling past, tigers roaring behind the glittering bars.
I followed the procession, once it had passed, as if I were a child in Hamelin. The earth thumped and shook, the sky hung behind clouds of confetti, and people rushed past me while I struggled to keep up. We traveled like this for a half hour—moving until we arrived in a pristine green field with only the occasional dandelion interrupting, where we watched as spikes were laid into the ground and the canvas tents raised up on them. We watched the train unload, the wagons and cages being rolled off one by one. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I didn’t care. I had been waiting my whole life for this, I felt then, even if I hadn’t realized it until I’d met Mary Finn. I thought of all those mornings I had spent hanging from the bar in the window, staring out into the fields as the sun burned into my parents’ backs, imagining that there was something wonderful in the world, beyond what I could see.
Unloading the train took all morning and most of the afternoon, but it felt like the tents appeared magically, within seconds, all on their own; the pounding of the metal spikes and hammers stopped, the tents rose up in the air, and the landscape was transformed completely. This is what the beginning of the world must have been like, I thought, as one by one the banners went up, the tents flapped open, and the talkers took their places outside, shouting out to the crowds to lure them into each show. The midway curled around the big top in a long circle. Behind the field the train stretched out like a shiny snake. The brochures and fliers I had seen in Mercy Library couldn’t begin to capture the excitement of all that hope and desire gathered up in one spot. Like an opal, I thought, everything wonderful ground down and contained within it.
I pressed into the midway with the rest of the crowd, then wandered through the tents and the sawdust. People jostled about everywhere, and the midway was one wonder after another: the sideshows with their flaring banners, the fortune-tellers, the Ferris wheel, the peanut and candy sellers, the booths where you could spin wheels or shoot at lines of bottles to win a plastic trinket. The world flooded my vision and I wanted to stop time, to be able to take it all into me. I couldn’t believe that the line of buildings stretching into the sky, just visible from the treetops, was still Kansas City. Everything about the city seemed dull and washed out, a shadow world next to this one that burst with color and life. Smells came from every direction, making my mouth water. I had never smelled things like roasted peanuts, hot dogs and burgers, funnel cakes, after all my years of potatoes and corn, and everything assaulted my senses at once. I walked down the line of tents, where talkers shouted out
, selling peeks at the moon for a nickel, or scales from a mermaid’s tail for less than that. A man who claimed he had the moon in a jar stopped me as I rushed past.
“Have you ever touched the moon, girl?” he called out. “I have a sliver of it right here.”
I stopped, terrified.
“There is a lady in the moon, as you well know, and you can talk to her if you’d like. You can ask her anything you want. Of course she is on the moon, but in here,” he smiled, tapping the glass, “I got a piece of her heart.”
I approached the man carefully, my whole body shaking, drawn by the glimmering jar in his hand.
As I pressed my coin into the man’s palm, he cracked the jar open, just the smallest fraction.
A crowd gathered around us. I watched the jar, the way the light sprinkled out of it like salt. I was mesmerized. Everything spun down to that jar resting in the talker’s meaty hands. At first I could hear nothing at all, and I could see nothing at all resembling a woman.
I tilted my head toward the jar so that my ear was almost covering the crack, my hair brushing against the talker’s hands. And then, all of a sudden, I heard it: the softest voice in the world, the faintest little cry, whispering to me, “Let me out.”
“What?” I whispered, scared to breathe. I heard the crowd around me, pressing in.
“Break the glass,” the voice whispered, so low that no one but me could have heard it, and even I, just barely. “Let me out.”
Before I could even register what I’d heard or make a move, a thin trail of smoke rushed out of the jar and toward the sky, and I was sure I saw a woman floating inside it. I blinked and looked again; all I saw was a whiff of smoke, then nothing.
I looked up and into the man’s face just as he broke into a smile that showed all his teeth. “It’s amazing!” he yelled, turning from me. “Now step inside and see the other wonders I’ve brought back from the sky!”
I was so shaken I had to sit down to recover.
Everything I had ever dreamt of was at the Velasquez Circus and the midway that wrapped around it. The show in the big top was set for that evening, the signs announced, but there was more than enough in the midway to keep the crowds busy until then. My eyes couldn’t take in everything at once, but I tried to remember that I had all the time in the world now: I had nothing else in the world besides that. As I wandered through the crowds, people pointed at me as if I were one of the wonders surrounding them. I didn’t mind. Everything was fantastic there, and surely I was not as strange as the boy with scales covering his body from his neck to his toes, beautiful iridescent scales that seemed to ring with light. His eyes sought me as I wandered into the tent. I smiled up at him from the crowd, my heart in my mouth.
In the next tent was a man who could swallow ten swords at once and then blow streams of fire from his mouth. My skin prickled from the heat, but I couldn’t stop watching him, just as I couldn’t stop watching the girl with the wings sprouting from her back, who walked out onto the small wooden stage next door. I huddled near the stage, lit by lanterns that threw shadows onto the canvas walls. The girl walked out in red sparkling heels. I heard them clack across the floor. She had wonderful curving legs and a torso shaped like a violin. Her blond hair un-spooled down her back and hung around her face—bright blond hair, like starlight. I thought she might be twenty years old. She turned around and shook off her sequined top, revealing curled-up white feathered wings. She smiled at me with her painted lips as she unfolded her wings slowly, inch by inch, like in the vision I’d had in Mercy Library, until the tips touched the sides of the tent with a thwack. Once again I found myself amazed by the sheer beauty of what I was witnessing, of how the world unfolded and revealed itself.
I stepped into the midway as if coming out of a spell, the hush of the girl’s wings rustling in my ears. A buzzing sound pulled me into the next tent, where the hugest bumblebee in the world pressed its face against a jar, next to a tarantula so big I could have swung from its legs. The coins slipped out of my hand as I went from tent to tent in a daze. The mermaid girl swam through a glass aquarium, flicking her tail near the surface so that water splashed onto the crowd. The tallest man in the world could have balanced me on one set of fingers. The snakes hissed at me as they slid across the snake girl’s body, wrapping themselves around her neck and waist and thighs.
Suddenly music filled the air, from the big top, and everyone started moving toward it. For all the wonders of the midway, it was clear that the real magic took place within the tent that rose up in the middle of everything. Every person I passed seemed alive with the same excitement I felt; I could close my eyes and hear the whoosh of the trapeze, see the darkness shrouding the audience, their eyes glowing out of it, and I could hear the beating of rain. It all ran together—the sounds and smells and images that made up my memory and my past, which was always Mary’s past and would always be Mary’s past before mine. What had she felt, I wondered, as she stood outside the big top for the first time, surrounded by the talkers, the banners announcing the most astonishing, impossible feats and creatures? I imagined her next to me then: not the Mary I had known but the young Mary, the one who’d followed Juan Galindo and arrived at the same place I was standing now.
The talkers continued to yell into the crowds, luring us into each tent, seducing us.
“Girl!” a voice called. It seemed far away and right in my ear, all at once. I looked up. A fortune-teller sat inside a partially opened tent, beckoning me in. I stared at her, then slowly pushed through the curtain and sat across from her, leaning forward until my chin touched the table-top. She smiled and her face was like a planet, covered in pockmarks and dropping from her bones. A sign saying “Fortunes, 20 cents” hung above her.
“Here,” I said, pulling out two dimes from my skirt pocket.
“Let me see your palm.”
I hesitated, then pushed my fist across the table and unclenched it. She put her fingertips on my palm, and I flinched, then looked up at her.
“Such extraordinary hands,” she said, studying them. “Hands like this are special. Your love line runs right to your wrist, do you see? You will have a great love in the future, not too long from now. More than one.”
“Yes,” I said, excitedly. “The trapeze, the circus.”
“No,” she said. “A man, and not only one.” She winked at me. “You’ll be a heartbreaker, you know. You wait and see.”
I stared at her dumbly, then laughed out loud. “You’re making fun of me.”
“I never tease about love,” she said solemnly, watching me with her large, soft eyes.
I shook my head and stepped back into the crowd, let the fortune-teller’s words sink into me as I gave myself over to the spangles and the talkers’ ballies, luring us inside the tents.
The sun started to drop in the sky, behind the line of train cars, and everything became more frenzied and wild. The Ferris wheel exploded with light. The crowds had grown even larger, though I had hardly thought it possible. I seemed to be the only one alone. The air smelled like powdered sugar and fresh dough. I bought myself a stick of spun sugar, which tingled and melted on my tongue, then a candy apple I spent an hour licking the coating from. I held the sugar into the light to watch it sparkle and melt. The grass and dust crunched under my feet. Lights started to shoot on everywhere, popping like little explosions from the strings that looped from one tent to another.
The crowds pushed toward the big top, the midway tents started blacking out their lights, and the circus music grew louder and more frantic, pulling us to the main show. I stepped into the big top, past a starry black curtain and into the main space. Grass blades jutted through the sawdust. The smell was sharp and strong. Lights splashed everywhere through the tents, feeling out the corners and the spaces underneath the bleachers. I ducked my way through everyone to find a space up front, squeezing myself onto the end of a bench in the first row.
Within minutes the place seemed crammed with all of Kansas City.
I stared, trying to memorize everything: the way the paint swirled through the sawdust, spelling out VELASQUEZ, the way the top of the tent sloped down, jangling with ropes and wires and hooks that seemed to crisscross the whole ceiling. If I squinted, I thought, I could see Marionetta spinning in the air, a blur of light darting from one side of the center ring to the other.
Suddenly the whole place went black. A hush fell over the crowd, as if we were leaning in, waiting to hear a secret. I held my breath and waited.
When the lights snapped back on, everything seemed to break open. Pure white horses, sparkling with rhinestones, ran out like streaks of light from the back of the tent, with beautiful women perched on top of them. A voice boomed out from the center of the ring, and a tall, black-clad man stepped out to introduce the famous Vadala horses. The world turned inside out, and the glare of the lights, the rhinestones, the wonderful pure white horses’ manes, the snap and crack of the whips and the bars and the wires, the boom of the ringmaster’s voice—all of it just whirled around me like another body, ready to pull me into itself. Under the lights everything would be different, I thought, with a purity and a certainty I hadn’t felt before. Once I was under those circus lights, dressed in rhinestones and glitter, flying through the air—then everything, all the pain and hurt and longing within me, would disappear. I was seventeen, ready to slip out of my past and create a new one—a brand-new one, shiny as glass. Here was my life, I thought. The one I had always hoped for.
They brought out the cats that jumped through hoops of fire and stood on their hind legs; the clowns who stumbled and leapt across the floor; the girl who hung from her hair and did flips in the air, like a strange insect or bird. I saw the contortionists who could rest their toes on the tops of their heads, their stomachs against the ground. We, the audience, were bathed in blackness, and the performers passed in front of us like a dream. I longed for Mary as I had imagined her, for a friend I could turn to and say, “Look! Look what they can do!” For a brief moment I imagined Geraldine next to me, her face radiant and open the way she had been the night I’d first told her about Mary and the trapeze. “You would love this,” I whispered, and then winced as I imagined my father slapping her face at the dinner table, the way she would always just sit there dumbly and grow dark red.