Читать книгу Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon - Страница 6

That tramp! Black-haired Jezebel!” My mother’s voice screeched into the house, from the yard. Up in my room, I thought a storm had come until I saw the bare windowpane, the butter-colored sun streaming in.

I ran down the wooden steps and out the front door, peered through the railings on the front porch. My father was out by the hedges again, clipping as if some devil had possessed him, sweat streaming down his face and the shears sprouting from his giant body like antlers. For two days now all we’d heard were the sounds of metal slicing against metal, twigs being snapped through and dropping to the ground. The crops in the field were going to ruin, but my father didn’t care. Our front yard was already adorned with an elephant, a lion, and a peacock with a spray of leaves fanning behind it. The hedge he was attacking now was fourth in the line that hemmed in our yard, blocking it from the country road that stretched all the way to town.

“STOP IT!” my mother screamed, beating on his back with an umbrella. My meek, religious mother who spent her days bent over in the fields and her nights bent over a Bible. “Stop that infernal clipping!”

No one could so much as raise a voice to my father without his hand coming down on them. I winced for my mother and braced myself for the beating that would surely come, once my father went back to normal. If he ever went back to normal. I had never seen my father get himself into such a frenzy. Two days ago he’d returned from market with a basket half full of eggs, picked up the clippers, and started going at it. Now the slicing sounds had made their way into our dreams, and we didn’t know if he’d ever stop.

I heard my sister Geraldine behind me, breathing loudly, hunkering down and pressing her face to the rails. “It’s that new librarian,” she whispered. “Mary Finn. The one that’s making all the men crazy.”

“He sold eggs to her in town just before this started,” she said.

I leaned back against the steps. Mary Finn. I knew exactly who Geraldine was talking about, of course. When Mary Finn had arrived in Oakley earlier that summer, farmers had suddenly started walking miles out of their way to pick up the classics of English literature, and a constant stream of women had started coming by to visit my mother, whispering about the new librarian’s wild gypsy past and the secret lovers who visited her after the library closed. Men wouldn’t be able to sleep for days after Mary Finn walked by, the old gossips said, and if her blue cat’s eyes met theirs, they were liable to start writing feverish poetry late into the night, or painting murals filled with flowers and beautiful women, set in places they’d never seen.

“A woman like that is nothing but trouble,” my mother clucked, as if she were commenting on a bad harvest. But I saw her clutching her rosary beads, which she started carrying around everywhere even though we didn’t have an ounce of Catholic blood in us. I saw the way she began watching my father out of the corner of her eye.

My mother turned and saw us crouching on the steps. “Get off of there!” she screamed, storming toward us. “Geraldine, get in the fields and help your brothers! Tessa, get back to your stretches!”

Geraldine took off running. I turned to the house, but my mother reached me before I could get away and grabbed me by the collar. “You stay on that bar until supper, Tessa Riley,” she hissed, dragging me into the kitchen. “No wonder you’re not getting any better. You don’t even care that everyone thinks you’re a freak? You don’t want to improve yourself?”

She pushed me to the window, and I scrambled up and grabbed the curtain rod she had rigged for me, back when she still thought my body could pull and stretch out like taffy. Hanging there, I could see Geraldine and my two brothers bent over the corn outside. The sun seared into their skin. As my mother slammed out of the room, I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of metal against metal, of twigs snapping and falling to the ground. Tears slipped down my face. I was not a normal child: I was twelve years old but just barely cleared four feet; the kids I passed on the way to market called me a munchkin or a freak; my hands were shaped like two starfish and as small as plums.

Mary Finn, I thought. I honed in on the idea of her, grabbed on to it as if she were a talisman. I just couldn’t imagine anyone—or anything—that beautiful. My mind set to wondering about it, about what she was like. If she would be as mean to me as all the rest of them, or if maybe there was something different about her, that same thing that set all the old hags on edge. The more I thought, the more I felt something crack open in me. Before then I had always kept to myself. I had gone whole days without touching another human being or making a sound.

One morning a few weeks later, long after the hedge incident we’d vowed never to speak of again, my entire family except me left to look at the pumpkins a farmer had grown two miles down the road—so big, they had heard, that two people could fit into each one. I waited half an hour before dropping down from the curtain rod and heading to the town square. With a pounding heart, I sat on the curb in front of the Oakley courthouse to watch the people pass. I sat stiffly, self-consciously, and tried to ignore the kids who walked by laughing. After an hour, my back and legs were starting to ache, and I wondered if I should go to Mercy Library itself to find her, though I had never been there before and the idea filled me with terror.

It was then that I looked up and saw her, and I knew right then and there what all the fuss was about. There was no mistaking her—nor was there any mistaking the old women who crossed themselves as she passed by, the men who stopped right in their paths and were moved to dance or song or tears. She carried a straw basket filled with red and yellow vegetables, with some papers and books poking over the side, and she walked through the square with her head up, her black hair glittering in the light, so wild it was like a field of weeds. She wore silver earrings that hung to her shoulders and a bright skirt that swished around her feet as she moved. The other townspeople scurried past or loped along, but Mary walked calmly, like a dancer, her back perfectly straight. I gazed up at her and thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, with her blue eyes and brown, freckled skin; she was the kind of woman that adults are wary of and children love—you could just imagine that she had cabinets filled with candy when your own parents had only milk and grain.

When Mary turned her cat’s eyes on me and then started walking toward me, I gasped out loud. I didn’t even know where I was. I felt like I was traveling up and down a muddy river on some long, open boat, or slashing my way through crazy branches and trees in some huge rain forest. The funny thing was, I’d never even known those other kinds of places existed before I saw Mary Finn walk toward me with that hair no earthly comb could ever get through trailing out behind her, smile at me, and sit down by my side.

She smelled of the spices my mother baked oranges in. Her wrists jingled with bracelets. I felt myself enveloped in her scents and by her hair that brushed my bare shoulders and made me shiver as she sat down.

For a few moments she just sat next to me, stretching her tanned legs into the street, smoothing her skirt over her knees. I could only sit and stare. I watched her hands and her calves and thought how her skin seemed warm, like a blanket, or bread just out of the oven. When she turned to me and smiled, I felt like I’d been struck.

“What a perfect little girl you are,” she said. “Why are you sitting here alone?”

I stared at her. I could barely believe that she was sitting right there in front of me. Mary Finn, who was the closest thing to a movie star Oakley had ever seen.

But she just rubbed her brown arms and stuck her hand in her hair the way other women stick combs.

“Did you know that stars die?” she said. “They burn themselves out and they fade from the sky, but they are like ghosts.”

I looked at her.

“There are no ghosts,” I said quickly, then felt my face grow as red as the radishes my parents bent over to pick each day.

“Oh, but there are,” she said, smiling at me with her crooked teeth and lifting my right hand into her own. “You see this pinky right here? This little half-moon on the bottom of your pinky nail? It was once a star, you know, a star burning in the sky, but when it came time for the star to disappear, it just fell to the earth instead. Every part of your body—the moon on your pinky nail, the blue rim in the center of your eye—was once part of a star.”

Not even my own mother had ever been kind to me like this. I felt all lit up and almost glowing, imagining my body spread across the night sky like an explosion, sparkling down to the half-moons on my fingernails.

“And so the stars come back to haunt us,” she said, “the way everything else does, sooner or later.”

That night I couldn’t stop thinking about it—me, Tessa Riley, sitting in the town square in front of everyone, talking to her. I stared at my flat body in the mirror, wondered what it’d be like to have that sort of presence in the world, to curve and slope and glide. Later I could barely focus on my stretches, and just swung listlessly from the curtain rod. I had to visit Mary Finn’s library, I decided. I convinced myself that my mother would understand, and as soon as my family came trooping through the house, ducking through the doorway and smelling of sweat and roots, I crossed my fingers and asked her if she would take me to Mercy Library for the first time.

The walls trembled as they slipped the great sacks from their shoulders and dumped them onto the long wooden counters. “What?” my mother said, whirling around to look at me. “You are not going anywhere near that witch. Absolutely not.”

My father was silent for a long moment. “You know, girl,” he said then, as he reached down to grab a sack of vegetables, bringing it down on the kitchen counter with a thud. Bits of earth fell to the floor. “All that really matters is a handful of dirt and a perfect oval potato. The rest is just pie in the sky.”

“But I want to see what it’s like,” I said. I had never spoken back to my father before, and I saw his eyes slightly widen. “I can’t help in the fields anyway, and I can do my stretches at night.” It was true. The potatoes were so big I had to use both my hands just to hold one of them. Each kernel of corn was bigger than one of my front teeth. My brothers and sister could hold three ears in one hand, and I felt like I was surrounded by giants.

As my father continued to haul up the sacks, my siblings began scrubbing the potatoes and radishes furiously, tossing them into large tin buckets, and my mother boiled a pot of potatoes and carrots for one of her famous stews. I was on the floor with corn strewn around me.

“Listen to me,” my father said, with a menace in his voice that hadn’t been there a second ago. No one outside my family would have even noticed it, but every single person in that room recognized his tone and what it meant. We caught our breaths and waited. “That place is unholy. You will not set foot in there. There’s enough for you to do here.” He flashed his face back at me, then breathed out heavily, relaxing. “Just pay attention, girl, and the husk’ll come peeling off like banana skin.”

He turned back to the sink and we were all silent then.

Usually my father’s disapproval could put a halt to anything brewing inside me. His disapproval could freeze up a river, it seemed, in the middle of June. But something had shifted in me, and that night I lay in my bed, listening to Geraldine snoring from the other side of the room, and I thought and schemed and reflected.

The next morning I dutifully hung from the bar. My muscles were so strong I could hang for hours, and on most days I just lifted myself up and over it or tried hanging from my ankles. That morning I hung still as a board, dreaming of my escape. Waiting. I stared out into the fields, at my parents’ and siblings’ bodies bent over the crops, the sun burning their backs. The corn jutting up.

When it came, lunch seemed to last for hours. I stood on a stool stirring the stew, as usual, while Geraldine set the table and my father and brothers rested in the den. At the table, I shoveled in my food without tasting it, trying not to stare at the clock or my family’s shrinking bowls of stew. I could barely sit still, and more than once my mother had to warn me to stop fidgeting.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my feet burning, my whole body straining toward that library across town.

As soon as the bowls were washed and the house empty, I hurried outside, crouching down in the dirt road so my family wouldn’t catch sight of me. I scrunched myself alongside the corn and moved as quickly as I could toward open space. Once I was out of their line of vision, I ran and ran and nothing else mattered. The whole countryside smelled thickly of manure and growing vegetables and cut grass, but I ran so fast all I smelled was wind. It was exhilarating, breaking their hold like that. I could barely breathe, and my muscles burned from my shoulders down to my calves, but I laughed and whooped when I reached the main road that stretched through the farmland: the fields of crops and the creeks and rivers that crisscrossed our part of the world like veins. I followed the road through the country and into town, sweeping past all the people who stopped in their tracks and just gaped at me. I didn’t care. For a minute I thought: the world would be so beautiful, if it were just this, this feeling right now.

Finally the library loomed up in front of me. The air seemed to go cool and misty, all at once, as if a thunderstorm were about to burst on us. From the outside the place looked like a massive barn more than anything else, except for the piece of metal swinging from a stick out front saying “Mercy Library” and the fact that it had been painted stark white. There wasn’t much around it, just piles of overgrown grass and clumps of dandelions and some trees hanging down into the road, one with branches so long they scratched across the library’s roof. I stared up at the library, my heart pounding so hard it threatened to break through my chest.

It was the farthest I’d ever been from home. Already it felt like hours and hours had passed, though it couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes. For a moment I considered turning back, but something inside me wouldn’t allow it. All the bravery buried within me seemed to push up to the surface, forcing me to take another deep breath and walk toward the front door. This is my chance, I thought. My one chance for something new.

Just then an old couple pushed out past me.

“I saw the way you were looking at her!” I heard the woman hiss to the man under her breath.

“I was getting book advice, Meg, book advice. . . .”

Startled, I slipped out of their path as they barreled by, then stepped into a vast, almost church-like space with old wood floors and a breezy high-beamed ceiling. Light streamed into the space from the huge windows on either end, illuminating the dust in the air. Towering shelves divided the room, all painted different colors. Books poured from every box, every shelf, every basket, and every drawer. To my left was a large desk with books and cards spread over the top, an ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes. People milled around with books in their arms, but quietly, as if afraid of making a sound. I could have sworn I heard the sound of rain, but when I glanced out one of the long windows on the far wall, the sun was flaring and the sky bright blue. The whole place smelled like smoke tinged with spices and must.

I realized I was standing there with my mouth open, so I snapped it shut and forced myself toward the shelves. I picked an aisle without even looking and began wandering through it, running my fingers along the spines of the books. I stopped and plucked one off the shelf, stared at the black markings inside until I grew dizzy. I heard a sound then and looked up to see a couple standing at the end of the aisle, kissing. When a man turned in and started toward me, I nearly fell over with fear—until I realized he wasn’t paying me any mind at all, but was staring intently at something through a gap on one of the higher shelves.

Suddenly I heard the faint sound of sobbing. I looked around, startled, then tiptoed over, as far away from the man as possible, to peer through one of the openings myself.

I saw a woman with a scarf pulled over her face, sitting at the table and crying. Mary Finn sat across from her. I heard the shush of whispers but could not make out what they were saying. The two women were almost opposites: the one hunched over and covered from head to toe, the other awash in color, her black hair coiling down her bare arms, her tanned, freckled shoulders glimmering as if with oil. Mary’s eyes were intent on the woman across from her, and she reached out her hand to the woman, patted her arm. I moved closer, out of one row and into another, and another, where I could hear. It was one advantage of my size: I could move quietly, as if I were not there at all. By the time I was able to see again, Mary had set out a deck of cards—tarot cards, I would learn later—and was explaining them to the woman. Then, for a moment, the woman’s scarf slipped and I saw her face in profile, only for a split second before she quickly covered herself again. It was Mrs. Adams from down the road, I realized, shocked. But she was different now, rubbed raw and bare. I could see her sadness, slipping off her body like smoke.

“But how can I make him stay faithful?” I heard her whisper, her voice all twisted up from any way I’d ever heard it.

“I have no mind for vision or prophecies,” Mary whispered then. “I just know what the cards say. But if I were you I would wear a yellow skirt and toss yarrow root in his tea before bed. It will keep him close to home when he wants to wander.” She reached down and held up a handful of something green and glittering, then quickly wrapped it in a kerchief and slid it to Mrs. Adams.

“Thank you,” the woman whispered, wiping her face. Mary looked up then, straight at me, through the books. Her eyes like cat’s eyes, blue as sapphires. I ducked. A moment later I heard Mrs. Adams shuffling away, and prayed Mary was following her.

My heart pounded.

“What are you doing, little girl?” I heard Mary’s smoky, low voice over me and looked up. The scent of gingerbread wafted down the aisle.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, but she just smiled and beckoned for me to come toward her.

“Have you come to visit me?” she asked. “These women, they always want my advice. They think I’m some kind of witch.” She made a spooky face and I laughed without thinking. “Then they ignore me on the streets, pretend they haven’t come by to tell me their heartbreaks and woes. They’re embarrassed that they have hearts at all, I think.”

I smiled. “I sneaked out of my house. I’ve never been here before.”

“Come,” she said. “There’s probably a line out the door by now.”

I began following her through the stacks to the front of the library, staring at her multicolored swirling skirt.

“Have you come for some books, too?” she asked, looking back.

I blushed. “I can’t read,” I said.

She looked at me with surprise just as we came to her desk, where three people stood waiting for her return. All old farmers, I realized, with their hands full of books. I expected them to be angry, having been made to wait like that, but they all lit up and practically shone as Mary came near them.

“Well, we’ll have to fix that,” she said, winking at me, before taking her seat behind the desk. “Why don’t you sit next to me while I help these gentlemen?” She smiled up at the first man in line as I sat on a stool nearby.

“Shakespeare, I see,” Mary said to the man. “The sonnets. They’ll make a romantic of you yet, Joe.”

I swear that old farmer blushed all the way down to his collarbone. “I liked Troilus and Cressida,” he said. “You were right about that’un.”

Mary smiled, then picked up another book and put it in with the one he was holding. “You’ll like this even better.”

I watched Mary check out books for at least half an hour before the library began emptying out. I stared at her mass of hair, so black it seemed to glint blue in parts, and her brown shoulders. My sister had brought home a movie magazine once and I had felt the same way then, looking at the women with pale hair and dark lips, their eyebrows like swooping lines across their foreheads. I touched my hair with my hands, imagined my body stretching up and filling out, covered with swishing fabrics like the ones Mary wore. This is what it means to be a woman, I thought. She picked up each book and thumbed to the cards in the back, and I watched her strong, sure hands.

I sat on the stool, praying she wouldn’t tell me to leave.

After a while, when the library had cleared out, Mary turned to me. “It’s busiest in the mornings and evenings,” she said. “Mostly I have the afternoons to myself.” She smiled. “So tell me, why don’t you know how to read? Aren’t you in school?”

“No,” I said softly. “My folks don’t believe in schooling. I’m supposed to work in the fields with the rest of them, but they don’t want me on account of my smallness.” I could feel my face growing red and lifted up my hands to cover it.

“Don’t believe in schooling?” she said. “What do they have you do all day, then?”

I looked up at her, nervous, but saw she wasn’t laughing. “I used to have to do chores but my house is so big, I couldn’t do much. I can’t do anything right is what my mama says. Sometimes I sneak out and hide in the fields or come to town to watch people. My mama wants me to eat potatoes and stretch my body in the window so I’ll get bigger. Then I can make my contributions, she says.”

“Well, you should have visited me sooner because that doesn’t sound like much fun at all.” She laughed. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, in fact.”

I took my hands slowly from my face and rested them in my lap. I looked up at her and smiled.

“You know,” she said, leaning in closer, “I didn’t get along with my family either.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she said. “My father was not a nice man. I left home as soon as I was able.”

“Oh, one day I would like to do that.” All of a sudden it seemed possible that I could leave Oakley some day, just like that.

“You will,” she said. “There’s a big place for you in the world, no matter what you think now. You’re like I was when I was your age, back when I thought I had no place at all.”

I just looked to the floor, my heart beating wildly.

“What do you love to do, Tessa?”

I looked up at her, afraid she was making fun of me. “Me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I scrunched up my mind and thought hard about her question. I could barely think of anything I liked, let alone loved. I knew I didn’t like farming or shucking corn. I knew I didn’t like Oakley, or my giant, ravenous family, or the vegetables that spilled from the counter and sink and onto the floor. I knew I didn’t like the way I felt all the time, so freakish and small, so scared of everything.

“I don’t know,” I said, finally, watching the light streaming in from the windows and slanting through the air. “This is the only thing I’ve ever loved, being here right now.” It came up on me just like that, the realization that there was nowhere I’d rather be, that this was as close to happiness as I’d ever been.

She smiled. “It’s a good place, this library. Like entering another world. You can open up any of these books and just forget about the fields and rivers outside, the farms and horses. The past.”

“It’s so different here,” I said. “You’re so different.”

She peered into me and shook out a cigarette from a pouch beside her. The tobacco and paper crackled as she lit up. “Tell me about yourself, Tessa Riley,” she said.

I stared at the crazy-quilt skirt my mother had sewn for me, fingering the hem. I felt paralyzed, convinced I could never speak of my own life out loud, but I still felt the stories beating at my throat and lips.

“I have a sister named Geraldine,” I began, “and two brothers, Matthew and Connor. Geraldine and I share a room and the ceiling is as high as the stars. My mom’s name is Roberta, and my dad’s name is Lucas. They don’t notice me much, though. They’re always busy in the fields.”

“Really?” Mary asked.

I nodded solemnly. I’m not sure what possessed me then, but for the first time in my life my mouth just opened and everything came rushing out. I told Mary about the wooden house and the fields, and the rows of gem-hard corn we based our livelihood on. I told her about my favorite log and my father’s terrifying hands. I told her about how my mother made all my clothes out of the scraps of my sisters’ and brothers’ jumpers and dresses and pants. And I told her about how my mother laughed at me as she stitched my skirts and blouses, how she called them “clothes for a baby’s doll.”

Mary leaned toward me and touched my arm. “They just have their own vision,” she said. “For people like you and me, the world is different.”

I thought of the world outside my window, and the one I dreamt about when I was out in the fields alone. Not knowing what to say, I just looked up at her and smiled.

She stood and stretched. “I’m making some tea. Want a cup?”

“Yes, please,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure. She winked at me and started walking to the open space beyond the stacks, on the left side of the room. Her sandals clacked dully on the floorboards. Alone, I stared at her desk, trying to memorize everything on it before she got back—the glossy cards and scattered notebooks, the rumpled papers for her cigarettes, a discarded silver bracelet, a tiny clown figurine painted red and yellow. I wanted things like that someday, I decided. Things of my very own.

Soon the whole place smelled like herbs. When Mary reemerged with two steaming cups of tea a few minutes later, it seemed like the most exotic thing in the world. I peered into my cup, staring at the greenish water with the herbs floating at the top.

“It’s my special recipe,” Mary whispered. “It will make you irresistible.”

When I took a sip it was like drinking grass and sage.

“I have an idea,” she said, setting down her cup. “Why don’t we write out your name? It’s such a good name; it’s a shame not to set it down somewhere.”

We grabbed our tea and she led me out the door, over to a pile of wood stacked against the building. The sun, low in the sky now, made the landscape blaring and golden. I shielded my face with my hands and stared into it: the mountains hovering in the distance, the sun seeping through them like melting butter.

“Here we go,” Mary said, pulling a long twig from the pile. And she did the most amazing thing. She knelt close to the ground and began drawing shapes into the dirt.

“That,” she said, pointing, “is a T. For Tessa. Do you hear that? Ta.” Her mouth moved slowly over the sound, then spat it from the roof of her mouth.

“Ta,” I said.

As the sun dipped lower and lower into the horizon, Mary carved into the ground and broke my name into a stream of sounds and shapes: the crossing lines of a T and an E, the two snake shapes spinning out next to them, the shape of a swing set when you see it from the side. The letters seemed to swarm through the dirt, sparkling as if they had a life of their own.

“Your turn,” she said. I grabbed the twig and Mary guided me through each letter, slowly, until my name lay across the dirt twice—once in her elegant hand, and once in my own scrawl. When I was done putting my name there, I don’t think I had ever seen anything so astonishing.

“I did it! I can do that!” I cried.

“By the end of this month, little girl, you’ll be able to read words straight from the page. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and I’ll show you some new letters? In the afternoon?”

“There are more?” I asked, and then I thought about our name at Riley Farm, set out for the world to see. It was all so overwhelming to me, but Mary just laughed.

“I’m not sure what my parents will say,” I said. My heart began to sink then. I had no doubt this would be my first and last visit to Mercy Library, and that I would pay for it as soon as I got home.

“I know they don’t believe in schooling, but wouldn’t they like you to learn to read and write?”

“My father doesn’t believe in it. And my mother wouldn’t want me to learn here, from you.” I clapped my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“You know, Tessa,” Mary said, bending down to me. Her earrings swung back and forth and made a tinkling sound. “There have been more popular women than me in the world—among the womenfolk, that is. It’s all right. But it’d be a real shame for you to go through life without any words. You’re a smart girl.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, wondering why I felt like crying. I was so afraid I would never see her again, that I would wake up and realize I had only dreamt this. Fear clenched my chest as I imagined endless days surrounded by giant corn, the smell of earth on my hands, my family towering over me and stomping through the fields. It was like flying through the clouds one minute and dropping back to earth the next. I looked down at my name carved in the dirt, and I leaned down, snatched it from the earth, and dumped it in my pocket.

“Now give me a hug and get out of here,” she said, and leaned in and gathered me up. For a second the strong spice scent was everywhere. “I hope I’ll see you again soon, Tessa Riley. Come visit me anytime at all.”

Walking back through town, past the fields and farmhouses, I felt like a completely new person. I grasped the dirt in my pocket with my fist, felt it tingle in my palm, and stared up at the black star-speckled sky. The dirt crunched under my feet. I closed my eyes, listening to the rhythm of my walking, the lusty sounds of crickets and frogs in the distance. It was August, and the nighttime just made the heat seem thicker and more wet, like a substance I had to wade through. My heart pounded. The world was bursting with life. I took my time getting home, breathing the night air in and out, stretching out my arms to take it all in. Even if my father beats me black and blue, I thought, this day will have been worth it. No matter how bad things get, I will have this day.

When Riley Farm appeared ahead of me, I squashed the dirt in my hands, steeling myself, preparing for anything. I crept across the front lawn, deafened by the sounds of the crickets and cicadas, and pushed through the front door as quietly as possible. The house felt so stark and prim against the lush night. I felt a knot form in my throat and stay there. I stood for a moment in the dark, empty hallway, barely breathing, then heard the clattering of silverware coming from the kitchen. I stood for a few minutes longer, suspended between two worlds, before I tiptoed into the kitchen, to the round oak table we all crowded around.

My father and brothers shoveled bread and stew into their mouths, not even looking up. I took my seat next to my sister, and my mother handed me a bowl without saying a word.

“Where have you been, child?” my father asked.

I froze. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, staring into my stew. “I was doing my stretches outside.”

I felt his eyes on me and winced.

Tessa, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut and focusing on the dirt, the shapes, the sounds pulsing from Mary’s tongue. Ta.

“Eat your stew,” he said, in a voice so tight I thought it might whip out and lash me. Later, I knew, he would make up for whatever he was holding back now.