Rain Village

  The next thing I knew, I found myself blinking my eyes open and staring up at the sun. I didn’t even remember going to sleep. My eyes ached and watered, and my skin was caked with dried tears. Grassy dirt stuck to my legs and arms. Scenes from the night before flooded through me, filling me with grief and anger. For a few minutes I lay there with the sun pounding over me, keeping my eyes closed. My head throbbed. I imagined myself staying there forever, in that same spot, pressing my cheek against the grass. My heart was just an ache in my chest. There was no point in moving, I thought. No point to anything at all.

  Finally, after an hour or so had passed, I sighed and started rubbing the grass from my legs. I reached into my bag, pulling out the first bit of material my hands landed upon, and did my best to clean myself up with the lacy skirt, wiping it over my face and rubbing myself pink. I winced at how sore I was, how much it hurt to move. Suddenly I felt something scrape against my cheek, heard a rip, and I stretched out my arm and stared at the ripped-open hem, the thing inside it. I shifted my skirt and the sun caught hold of it, making it burn so brightly I had to shut my eyes.

  The ring, I thought. Mary’s ring.

  I pulled the skirt into my lap and crept into the shade, under a tree. My breath was short. I could feel my heart fluttering as I pulled the hem back again and let the colors—every color in the world, it seemed, all packed furiously together—shine out. It was everything beautiful, honed down to the size of a penny.

  It hit me then: this was what I needed. To show the ring to Lollie. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  I tucked the ring into the pocket of my skirt, and clasped my palm around it. I stood up and gathered my things.

  I walked back to the train, rubbing my eyes and blinking against the light. My grief and anger had exhausted me, hollowed me out, and each step felt like twenty. I could already hear the circus music starting up. In the daylight the Ferris wheel seemed a shadow of its nighttime self, but it still glowed with color. I walked straight through the midway, through the tent, and into the backyard of the lot. I knew people were watching me, that I might get kicked out at any moment, but I was too tired to care. I needed to try again, just to know I’d really done it. There was always the factory, I thought. Always other circuses. Always the river.

  I moved past the gathered families, the performers all relaxing, sipping coffee, laughing and talking in the grass with bare faces and ordinary, everyday clothes.

  I saw Ana sitting on the steps of one of the many Vadala train cars—white horses galloping across them, one after another, so that ten cars strung together seemed like a whole herd—and waved. She sat with another young girl, larger than she was and maybe slightly older, who otherwise could have been her twin.

  “Hello!” she screamed, waving at me. Right away I saw her turn to the larger girl and start talking, pointing.

  I saw the flying woman on the side of Lollie’s train car and was lit with a new sense of purpose. I walked even more quickly. More and more people turned to watch as I walked by; there must have been something in my face, I thought, something making them sit up and take notice.

  Suddenly I wanted to show all of them. If there had been rope strung up across the backyard I would have leapt up right then. Look, I would say. Look what I can do.

  I scurried up the steps and into the car. I knocked on the door and then stood, waiting, for a long, breathless moment. There was no response. Raising my fist, I slammed against the door again and again until I felt my fist fall into air and saw her standing over me.

  In the daylight she was just as magnificent as she had been before. Glitter still clung to her cheeks, and her hair was like flames around her face. Her clothes were stark and black, her collar stiff. She looked calmer than she had before, but sad, too, as if she’d been crying.

  “You?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come because Marionetta sent me,” I said. “She told me about you, everything, and I’ve been waiting so long to find you.”

  She sighed, before I could say another word. “But I told you . . .”

  I drew my hand out of my skirt pocket, unclasped my fingers.

  Lollie gasped. I looked at her face, reflected in the lights of the ring, watched as the rays of color hit her with the forces of memory, desire, and regret.

  “You know this ring,” I said. “You know I knew her.”

  “Marionetta,” she whispered, then looked back up at me with her intense, hazel eyes. “Who are you?”

  “Tessa,” I said, staring back at her. “Tessa Riley.”

  “I didn’t recognize you,” she said, nodding.

  “Recognize me?”

  “I’ve seen you before,” she whispered, and then she stepped aside and motioned for me to come in. She sat, offering me a seat, and I lowered myself onto a velvet chair lined in gold wood. Leaning toward me then, she placed her hand on my wrist. A speck of glitter fell into my palm. She looked straight into my eyes so long that I had to look down. I had a thousand questions beating at me, but something told me to stay quiet, let her speak first.

  Gently, she turned my wrist over and traced my palm with her fingertip. At first her touch felt calming, soothing, and then I felt a tingling on my skin, a strange sense that she could see right into me. I resisted the urge to snatch my hand away.

  “You were close to her,” she said.

  I looked into her face. Wrinkles bled from her red lips, and her eyes were soft with age. She wore layers of makeup, I saw, but it looked like it belonged on her face. Like the movie stars in the magazines Geraldine used to bring home, with their white faces and bloody lips. Lollie’s shoulders dropped slightly as she looked down at me.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  The ring still beat in my hand, and I clamped my fingers over it, shoved it into my pocket again. “I should have known,” I said, without realizing it. “I should have seen it.” The words seemed to come out of me on their own. A strange urge moved through me, to tell her things, and I was furious at myself for talking about Mary that way. I didn’t want this to be about Mary, I thought. I didn’t want to be thinking of her all the time.

  “You couldn’t have,” Lollie said. “When I was a child I saw my brother fall from the wire before it happened, and even then I couldn’t stop it. The future is full and alive, like a beating heart, but that doesn’t mean you can change it.”

  I nodded, looked out the window of her car and toward the Ferris wheel. I watched it spin around and around, imagined sitting at the top of it and staring down at everything.

  “It wasn’t an accident with Mary,” I said. “It’s different.”

  “It’s our fate,” Lollie said, folding my hand and setting it on my lap. “It doesn’t matter how it comes to us, how it shows itself.”

  I looked around then, at the little crucifix hanging on her wall, the Virgin statues lined up on her dresser, the rosary beads hanging from her doorknob. An image of my mother came to my mind, her fingers moving down the length of beads, her lips whispering feverishly. The big top swayed in the wind. I felt a tear slip down my cheek and realized I was too sad, too beaten up, to care.

  I could have stopped her, a voice said inside me. You have to pay attention in this world, or things will slip away.

  “She taught me the trapeze,” I said suddenly, turning back to Lollie. “That’s why I’ve come here.”

  “You look so tired, niña,” Lollie said, placing her hand on mine and sending that same strange tingling feeling over my skin. “Why don’t you take a nap and I’ll wake you for lunch? I have an extra compartment.”

  I realized suddenly how exhausted I was from all the waiting and longing and sleeping on the ground, all the days pricking my fingers with needles in the factory, all the sadness that had sunk into my bones.

  “Thank you,” I said, nodding. When I stood up my head spun, and I was woozy with relief.

  Lollie made us a pot of
rose-petal tea and prepared a bed for me then. I fell back onto the mattress and felt I could never leave it.

  Still, I did not fall asleep right away. I lay in the bed watching Lollie’s costumes shimmer in the dim sunlight creeping through the curtains—from the bed I could see some of the bright banners that decorated and lined the midway. I could hear voices and all kinds of activity just outside the metal of the train car: people dumping pails of water, dragging equipment over the ground, roasting meat over crackling fires, walking in groups under my window.

  I lay with my face toward the ceiling, and I stretched my body out in the soft bed. Sleep descended on me in black clouds, but my eyes stayed open. It was too much for me. I was at the circus. It was like falling in love for the first time with something you believe is in your grasp and can change everything.

  I woke to the sound of a man yelling. For a moment I thought I was in my parents’ house again, in the bed my father had carved for me. I thought I’d dreamt everything until a man stormed through the small door and into my room.

  I jumped up.

  The noon sun streamed in through the train-car windows. Before I could even register where I was, Geraldo pressed into the room.

  “What is this girl?” he yelled, in a thick Spanish accent, turning to look behind him. Lollie appeared in the doorway then. She looked different than she had the night before—less haughty, less dreamy, more afraid.

  I sat up in bed and looked up into his flashing black eyes.

  “What are you? Why did you come here?” he said.

  Lollie raced in behind him and pulled him from the doorway. She slammed the door between our compartments shut, and I could hear the two of them shouting.

  “She knew Marionetta,” I heard her say. “Leave her alone.”

  “When were you going to tell me about this? What, she just suddenly appears one night and is in your car the next morning?”

  “Just for a day or two.”

  His voice spilled over the doorway and invaded every corner of my little room. It traveled along the back of my neck, making the hairs stand on end, making me want to bury myself in the earth.

  “Get out of here!” I heard her scream. “Back to your putanas!”

  His voice was like a tree falling. And then I heard tears, and more tears.

  “I’m sorry, Tessa,” Lollie said later. “Don’t mind Geraldo. He is a great, passionate man, an artist. You’ll see.”

  I just looked at her, with a clenched heart. Geraldo could do anything, I thought then, as long as he didn’t make me leave the circus. I had to stay. I had to find a way to show them what I could do.

  “Come,” she said. “I’ll show you around the lot.”

  We left the train car and headed toward the big top. Lollie waved at the performers spread out on the grass but kept walking. “Many of us practice there during the day,” she said, tilting her head at the canvas. A man walked by us with a sack full of garbage and a stick. We neared the smaller menagerie tent, and Lollie led me inside. I gasped at the tigers in their gilded wagon cages, the elephants tied to poles, the horses in their pens.

  “That’s Julia,” Lollie said, pointing toward a sleek tiger that was sprawled across the floor of her cage. She reached in her hand and petted the tiger, as if it were a kitten. When I did the same, I was surprised at the warmth seeping into my skin, the softness of it.

  We stayed for a few minutes with the animals, looking at the snow-white coats of the Vadala horses, so creamy-looking you wanted to run your tongue against them. Then Lollie led me to the midway, over the perimeter of the lot.

  “We don’t spend too much time around here,” she said, “but you might as well see it. There’s a tattooed man who hates the sight of his skin so much he covered himself with images of ships and sailors. He has whole cityscapes spreading across his broad back and sweeping down his arms. See?” She pointed to a hulk of a man emerging from a tent right then. From where I was, he seemed to be covered in bruises.

  “And that’s Clementine.” She pointed to the left, and I turned. It was the bird girl, shaking her wings out, airing them in the sunlight. She was so beautiful with her starlight hair and red lips, the wings hanging off her shimmering pale skin and folding along her waist and thighs.

  “She can’t be anywhere near a pool without her wings sticking together so badly she can’t move,” Lollie whispered. “Her wings are like a giant ache on her back. She has to spend all day lying on her stomach before heaving herself up and wiggling into her sequined top and skirt. She dreams about water.

  “Usually I don’t know so much about the sideshow performers,” Lollie added. “They keep to themselves. But Clementine and my youngest brother Mauro used to be in love. Quite a scandal.” She winked at me.

  As we turned toward the cookhouse, a makeshift kitchen and group of tables covered by a tarp, I saw four beautiful men standing in front of it. I recognized them instantly.

  “My brothers,” Lollie said.

  Carlos, Paulo, José, and Mauro were perfect gentlemen as they introduced themselves to me, each more handsome than the last. They all had the same black hair that Lollie did, and curving, lush bodies. “Bodies like fruit trees,” I thought, before recognizing the words from one of Mary’s stories. I could barely look at them. I felt like the child Costas, the kiwi-eyed boy who’d come upon all the wonders of the world at once.

  “The Flying Ramirez Brothers,” they were called, on the wire or the ground and in their stretched-out white sequined costumes, cut low in the front to expose their glistening brown chests. I would learn later that in the part of Mexico they came from, the Ramirez Brothers were the stuff of legend, and girls still described beautiful boys as “almost a Ramirez,” or “able to walk on steel wires.”

  “They’ll take good care of you,” Lollie said. “Maybe you’ll meet my other brother someday, too. Luis.”

  My head spun as we went into the cookhouse and sat down. The brothers’ white teeth, pale-coffee skin, and ink-black hair dazzled me. I could not tell them apart as I looked up at them. Lollie stayed by my side, her hand resting lightly on my shoulder as we sat down on the wooden picnic bench.

  “It is wonderful that you’re here,” said the oldest one, Carlos, reaching forward and placing his hand on mine. I tried to snatch my hand back, but he clasped it with his own. “Lollie says she knew about you, but she never told any of us about it.”

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “Yes,” José jumped in—José, whose hair in later years would turn white as flame. “Tell us how you got here.”

  Lollie laughed. “We’re thirsty for stories! Whenever news comes from the outside, we all gather around, and you can hear everyone chattering like birds for days after.”

  Mauro ran up to the cook and brought back plates of grilled meat and rice. The talk was easy; before I knew it the whole cookhouse had filled with circus people, many of whom I’d met on the way over or seen in the show the night before. I settled a bit into my skin and let myself enjoy the warmth of all of them around me at once. I told them about my nights by the railroad, waiting for them, my months working in the factory, where the machines hummed like insects. I surprised myself with how sure my voice sounded. I watched Lollie’s face, then looked to Carlos, with his great big hands; Mauro, the youngest, whose sweet eyelashes curled from his almond-shaped eyes; Paulo, my future teacher, with hair flopping in his face and down his neck; and the bad one, José, with his murderer’s hand and quick, passionate heart. Soon the brothers would come into focus for me, and I would never mistake one for the other the way I did those first days.

  “Did you know, Tessa,” Paulo leaned in, “that Lollie saved my life with her vision? Once I was going to ride a black Arabian called Diablo, who would have shaken me off his back like water if Lollie hadn’t stopped me from going to the stables herself. After Luis I wouldn’t risk it. She could tell me to stay off the wire forever, and I would.”

  “I can still feel it,” Lollie
said, “You know, visions don’t fade the way memories do. They become part of what you are.”

  “Mary told me you could see things,” I said. “She said it gave her goose bumps to listen to you.”

  At the sound of her name, everyone turned to me. I remembered what Ana had said in the train car: that all the circus people told stories about Mary.

  “She is dead,” I wanted to say. “When she died there were leaves tangled in her hair, and I had to pick them out one by one.”

  But I did not speak.

  “Did you know Mary well, Tessa?” Mauro asked quietly.

  I had no voice to answer him with. A black hole gaped in me where Mary had been, one that swallowed all my speech. I could feel the blood rushing to my face, my hands fluttering against my plate.

  Mauro placed his hand over mine the way Carlos had earlier. But Mauro’s touch steadied my hand in an instant.

  I looked up at him.

  “Yes,” I said finally, after a long pause. “I did. I thought I knew everything about her.”

  I could barely breathe. Mauro stared at me intently, as they all did.

  “You know,” Lollie said slowly, brushing her hand over mine, “I remember the day she showed up here as if it were just a moment ago, just this morning.”

  “Really?” I asked. I hadn’t realized how much I, too, craved to hear about her, who she was and had been.

  By now it seemed that everyone in the cookhouse was gathered around our table or sitting quietly at their own, listening. I was surprised to see Ana at the next table, next to the ringmaster, who was barely recognizable in his sweatshirt and jeans. She waved at me and smiled.