rim of a black leotard, closed my eyes. I could feel it: that sensation of flying, of being over everything.
“Tessa!” I heard Mary calling from the main floor.
Hurriedly, I pushed past the wrapped costumes and found slippers and tights and caps and jeweled combs. I ran my fingers along the length of the heels, the feathers on the caps.
I heard the basement door click open and then Mary’s voice, louder now: “Tessa, are you down there?”
“Just a minute!” I cried. I grabbed the leotards and quickly folded them, layering them between sheets of tissue paper, in the box. I heard Mary’s footsteps on the stairs, slapped the box shut and shoved it in the corner.
I ran up to meet her.
“I’ve got a line up here,” she said. “I need help.”
For the rest of the afternoon I felt that box pulling at me. While Mary told fortunes in the back, I sat and checked out books, barely even looking up as I pulled out the cards to stamp and date them. The circus, I thought, imagining myself flying through the air, my body draped in red sparkles. The feel of the sequins and beads under my palm.
“Why don’t I go organize some of the files downstairs?” I suggested later, during a brief lull.
“Such a good worker you are,” Mary said, laughing. “Why don’t we take a tea break instead? God, I’m tired. I want to just slap these people sometimes and tell them to take a look around—of course they’re unhappy!”
I nodded but was awash with disappointment.
“How long were you in the circus?” I asked suddenly, as we made our way back to the little kitchen.
Mary turned to me. “About five seasons, I guess,” she said. She set a pot of water to boil and reached up for the herbs.
“Were you famous?” I asked, and then, before she could answer, “Why did you leave?”
The air filled with the smell of herbs and spices. We heard the front door open and voices fill the room. “Can you help those people?” Mary asked, handing me my cup and avoiding my eyes. She seemed relieved, anxious to get rid of me.
I tried not to look too disappointed. The rest of the afternoon went by quickly, and I didn’t have a chance to go back downstairs before Mary and I closed the library. She was in a hurry to get cleaned up and go into town, and kissed me on the cheek before disappearing down the stairs to her room.
Damnit, I thought, pausing outside on the front steps, every cell of my body pulling me to that box downstairs. Calling out to me, like a secret. Reluctantly, I started the walk home. I watched the snow gleam in the moonlight and thought of Mary on the trapeze. There was a whole world buried in that box, I thought. A world brighter and more wonderful than anything I could find in Oakley.
As I cut through the town square and the giant oak trees that shaded it, I spotted a branch extending straight from one side, about six feet from the ground. No one was around aside from a few men entering the tavern on the square.
I dropped my bag and leapt up, wrapping my palms around the branch. It was easy, just like hanging from the bar on the window back home. But here I was unrestricted: I swung back and forth, then pushed up and hung from my knees. The bark scraped my skin, but I didn’t care. I was a thousand miles away from Oakley, anyway.
The next day I scrambled down into the basement before Mary could stop me. She was busy hauling in water from the pump outside, and gathering herbs from her garden to set to drying.
“I need an old newspaper for Mrs. Olsen,” I said. I ran down, past the file room and through the hall, past Mary’s room with the mattress on the floor and line of skirts hanging from a ceiling pipe. When I came to the box I pushed past the leotards and caps, and dug in to see what other treasures it held.
I pulled up a pile of circus programs. I grabbed the whole stack of them, spread them across the floor. It was crazy, even liberating and wild, to see photographs of things I had only heard about from Mary. I’d never quite believed her stories were real, and yet there they were: beautiful boys crossing the high wire; a woman hanging from a thin rope by her hair; and then Mary herself in midflight, soaring from the catcher’s hands back to the bar.
She was so different in the pictures, different than any way I’d ever seen her. Her hair was pulled away from her face and tucked under a red beaded cap, and her skin practically glowed under the light. Even from that far you could see the tilted shape of her eyes, the soft, fluid lines of her arms and legs as they propelled her through the air. She was a bright, magnetic spot suspended amidst the ropes and hooks and metal rings.
It was rapturous: every single picture spoke of some new wonder, some new way of moving through space. I could barely breathe. With my whole being I wanted that, what I saw in the pictures. Flight.
I closed the programs and stacked them beside me, and then, pushing past more tissue paper and wrappings, I came upon a metal bar covered over in parts with tape, a line of rope extending from either end. A thick braided rope curled like a snake at the bottom of the box. Various chains and hooks and smaller ropes were scattered among the coils.
A trapeze, I realized, and rigging, and a web. I wrapped my fingers around the metal, and I swear they tingled with the magic of what that bar could do, where it could take me.
And then I no longer cared about getting into trouble, what Mary would say when she saw I’d been snooping. I grabbed that bar and ran up to meet her as quickly as my legs could carry me.
I burst into the room. It was one of those bright mornings when the sun slanted across the floor and all the books turned warm on the shelves. Mary stood at the front desk, next to a pile of books.
“Mary,” I began, breathlessly, “I want you to teach me the trapeze.”
Her eyes fell on the bar in my hands, and a strange look crossed her face, one I couldn’t place. “Where did you find that?”
“Downstairs, among the boxes.”
“You’ve been sneaking around?” she asked, her eyes flashing up at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pleading. “I just came across it. I had to look. I saw the costumes, the programs, you flying—it was all beautiful, Mary, the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“Those things are sealed away for a reason,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help it. Please teach me. Please.” I stopped when I saw how angry she was.
“Tessa,” she said slowly, “I haven’t flown on the trapeze for years now. It’s ancient history. Put that back, and don’t let me see it again.”
I was close to sobbing. “But Mary, I can feel it in my bones. I have to do this.”
She looked at me, her face reddening, and then stalked away. I knew better than to follow her.
For the rest of the day we worked in silence. When the evening came, I stormed from the library, slamming the door behind me as hard as I could. I don’t need her, I thought, kicking the side of the stairwell, slamming the dangling Mercy Library sign as I ran past. I ran until I reached the town square and the cluster of giant oak trees. I threw off my coat, furiously, and leapt up to one of the branches, started to swing.
As I swung, letting the air soothe me, the cold rip past my tears and anger, I heard laughter. I stopped, turned my head to see a group of kids clustered under another tree, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle between them.
“Tessa!” they taunted. “Tessa the witch!”
I dropped to the ground. My feet crunched into the snow. I was so angry I felt my body dissolve, until I was one voice screaming through the dark. “I hope all of you die!” I cried.
Before I turned and ran home, I swear they all looked genuinely frightened.