that that was what it was: loss of the most heart-wrenching kind, despite the books raging with life around me, despite Mary and her kindness, her beautiful words and stories.
By and large, it was the men in Oakley who had begun reading books—bringing candles into their rooms late at night to read the Canterbury Tales, perusing Montaigne while sitting in tractors or on bales of hay. They loved coming into the library and showing Mary how they’d read the selections she’d made for them, telling her about their favorite parts and lines.
Women sought Mary out more shamefully, in whispers and with scarves pulled over their heads. Beatrice and Mrs. Adams were only two out of what must have been five hundred women who came to see Mary when I was there. In my first year of working at Mercy Library, I heard women confess to hating their children; to loving women instead of men; to cheating on husbands with all variety of other men, from farmhands to cousins to the traveling salesmen who sometimes appeared at our doors with cases full of perfume or makeup; to hating their lives, our town, and the fields that kept all of us wrapped around their fingers; and to desiring any number of things so strongly that they could barely eat or sleep or get through the house- or farmwork they saw pile in front of them each day.
Several months into my new working life, I was sitting on a small rocking chair near the table, struggling through a book called Sister Carrie that Mary had picked out for me, while Mary sat behind the desk with a deck of cards spread out in front of her. She played absentmindedly with her cigarette as I spat out each word, fitting my lips and mouth around them. The cards snapped as Mary shuffled them between each game. The day had been particularly grueling: we had talked to a woman having an affair with a boy half her age, despite her husband’s legendary temper. Mary seemed especially quiet, melancholy.
“Love, that’s all anyone asks about,” she said, sighing. “It’s pathetic.” We finished closing the library together, then walked out into the balmy spring night, down to the river that ran a mile or so behind the library. We stretched on the grass by the river.
She turned to me. “Have you had any boyfriends yet, Tessa?”
“Me?” I looked at her, truly astonished.
“Of course,” she said, winking.
I didn’t know what to say. “Have you ever been in love?” I asked, finally.
“Oh,” she said, a smile forming. “Yes. Not for a long time, a very long time, but yes.”
“What is it like? Who was he? Is he the man from the post office?”
But she hardly heard my questions. Her eyes closed; the sweat glistened on her brown face. The warmth of her skin seemed to radiate all around me. I crept up close to her and put my face next to hers.
She said finally, “No, his name was William. From Rain Village. His body was perfect, like a sculpture you’d see in a museum, and he was just made like that. He would walk around naked, very casually, as if it were the most natural thing and his body were above such things as shame or modesty. Like a child’s white hair. As if he didn’t even know it.”
She seemed far away from me then, and to be talking to herself as much as to me. I squinted up, following her gaze. I felt that if I concentrated hard enough, I too would see him—naked, walking like a cat.
“He was pale, almost completely white. He was only a boy, you know. His hair was like the palest blond dipped in the ashes of a forest fire and his eyes were dark like wet river rocks. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep, and then he’d stalk around and curse the rain and the dark, and me. I would huddle in the blankets and block out every single thing but the warm imprint of his body, the faint smell of eucalyptus still in the bed.”
She stopped, and the night was quiet. All we could hear was the light lapping of the river, the slight wind stirring the grass and weeping willows and oak.
“His voice,” she whispered, “was soft and clipped, as if he’d been born in some other country. But he hadn’t been. Sometimes he could sit for hours and never say a word. He would carve designs into wood. If I moved or sighed, he noticed; he was always watching me, like I was made of glass.”
Her voice was so low I had to lean forward.
“He died. He drowned in the river. I remember how white and cold he was in the water, the leaves sticking to his skin. It’s why I left. Why I left Rain Village the way my older sister had before me. I left my mother, father, sister, and everything I’d known. William died in the river, and the leaves were like leeches on his skin.”
The night seemed to have darkened. Mary looked at the sky. I shivered, and she turned to me, reached up and touched my hair.
“You will fall in love, too. You won’t be unlucky like me.” She pulled herself up and sat cross-legged, facing me. “I left home. I just left, left my family and the rain and the river. And I went all over, and then I came here. Sometimes that is the best we can do in life: seek out new families and homes when the old ones have failed us.”
“Is that when you joined the circus?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She tilted her chin to the sky, her hair sticking every which way. She reached out her hand and slipped it into mine. Her long fingers dwarfed mine, and my pale skin seemed to glow next to hers.
“Do you miss Rain Village?”
She nodded, bending her head to her chest. “We lived in a stone house,” she said a moment later, smiling slightly, “in the middle of a forest. A forest as big as the sky. The river where they found William ran almost straight through the forest, about a ten-minute walk from our house. It was a river unlike any you’ve ever seen, Tessa.”
“I’ve only seen one,” I said. “This one right here.”
“You haven’t ever traveled out of here?”
“My father would never let us. He says the world outside of Oakley is filled with evils.”
She smiled. “I don’t think Oakley is immune to that, no matter what your father says. And why blame the world when it’s right here?” She tapped her chest.
“I think he has evil in him,” I whispered. “He makes all of us cry, sometimes. Is that evil?”
She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I think it is.”
“I want to travel,” I said. “I want to see Rain Village, and the circus.” I tried to call forth a picture in my mind. “What was the river like?”
“Oh,” she said, closing her eyes but holding my hand tight, “it was filled with salmon and other pink fish. The fishermen used to set their lines and let themselves drift along the water. They’d fall asleep like that, sprawled out on the fishing boats, the rain plinking down on their bodies.”
“That sounds terrible,” I said. “All that rain.”
“It was weird,” she said. “No one there complained about the rain, the dampness. There it was just normal. When I left, I baked myself in the sun, and I’ve been brown ever since. Before, in Rain Village, I was as pale as a ghost. I didn’t even know how curly my hair was until I left home and saw it dry for the first time.”
“That’s not true!”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “There, my face was covered in freckles, from the rain. When I left my skin turned completely clear. See?”
I leaned in and stared at her face, her brown, smooth skin. I gasped. “It’s true!” I said.
“Unless I’m lying, of course.” She laughed, and I was relieved, seeing her happy. “Everyone there was a storyteller, you know. At night the fishermen docked their boats and everyone gathered to tell stories. The water would have turned black by then, and if it weren’t too cloudy all the stars would be out, like they are now, like salt sprinkled over ink. Everyone who looked normal and friendly in the daylight turned spooky at night, with the flickering light and the black water behind them.”
“What