smiled, climbed up the ladder, and fastened the rigging to a ceiling beam. “Watch what I’m doing,” she said. “You may have to do it yourself.” At her command, I passed the chains up to her and watched her throw them over the beam, fastening the trapeze ropes to the shackles. Two pieces of rope hung down and the bar stretched between them, about eight feet from the floor. The final effect was so clean, perfect: a perfect shape, a perfect confluence of lines cutting through the air.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked, turning to her. “Are you sure you want to show me?” Guilt came over me; I felt so bad for pressuring her, for calling her names. I felt bad about everything.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll teach you to swing on the trapeze in a few days, when you’re done healing. Okay? But for now I wanted you to see it, feel the bar. Get comfortable with it.”
I nodded eagerly, stretched up to touch it.
“Here,” Mary said, pulling up the stool. “Stand on this.”
I climbed up on the stool and then stood, reaching out my arms. Mary’s hand pressed on my back to balance me.
I closed my palms around the bar, felt the cold metal of it against my skin. It was thinner than the bar in the window at home, and smoother, easier to grasp. I looked at Mary and smiled.
“Can I do it now?” I asked.
“You’re not ready,” she said. “You need to heal.”
“I’m okay, though. I don’t feel anything. Just once?”
She sighed, pretending to be exasperated. “Well, then, you’ll need to chalk up your hands, and you might as well change into a leotard so I can fix it up for you.” She made a face as I grabbed her hands and then jumped from the stool to the floor.
“Here,” she said, reaching into a small box on the floor, next to the rigging. “Put on this leotard. I’ll put one on, too.” I took the leotard she handed me and, with my back turned, slipped out of my clothes and into it. It hung from my body like a sheet. Once Mary was changed, she pinned mine up on the sides.
“Now chalk up your hands,” she said, gesturing to the canister she’d set out. “Dip your hands in and rub the chalk onto your palms. Like this.”
I pressed my hands in and was surprised by the cool powderiness, the clean smell.
“Now climb back up and grab the bar,” she said.
I nodded, swallowing, and climbed onto the stool. Then I looked up at the bar and sprang. I wrapped my hands around it, tried to get a firm grip.
“How do you feel?” Mary asked.
“Good.”
“Maybe you can swing a little, and then that’s enough for today.”
“Can I sit on it?” I asked, tilting my face to her. I loved the feel of air on all sides of me; I had never experienced anything quite like it. When I’d hung from the window, I was so close I could kiss the glass. Dangling from a tree, I’d had to curl my wrists around the branches, making it difficult to move as freely as I could now.
But on the trapeze, my body was like water. I could move in any direction, it seemed.
“Swing back and forth,” Mary said, “lifting yourself higher each time.” Her hands were on my back, guiding me. “Like this. Roll your body toward the bar.”
I strained my muscles and pulled myself—awkwardly at first, but on my third try I found myself clinging to the ropes on either side of me, looking out at the same shelves and books I had just viewed from the ground. Incredible. Even sitting there, unmoving, I felt almost transformed.
“I’m impressed,” she said. “How did you get to be so strong?”
I blushed. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that will make everything a whole lot easier, little girl. Now what do you say we get ourselves some lunch and pick this up again a few days from now?”
Giddy and happy, we changed out of our leotards, ran into the garden, and selected the plumpest tomatoes and nicest-looking greens. Mary tossed them together inside while I stood on the stool and cut thick slices of pumpernickel bread and cheese she’d bought at market.
When the food was ready we grabbed our plates and went down to the river. We spread our meal out on the grass. Lying there, my body still warm from the exertion, I felt almost beautiful for the first time in my life. I looked down at my arm and couldn’t even see the bruises anymore.
“Tessa,” Mary said, putting down her plate, suddenly serious, “promise you will never take a book home again.”
“I promise,” I said, biting into the sumptuous bread, the tangy cheese.
“I mean it,” she said. “I can’t stand to see you this way, with these bruises, these wounds. It reminds me of what I went through a long time ago, and you, you deserve a thousand times better than that. I wish I could protect you from him, but I can’t.”
Her voice was shaking, and her face flushed red. I looked at her. I wanted to ask questions, but wanted more to forget about every bad thing in the world, and for everything to come down to just this: this bread, this cheese, this river, and this one, perfect day. I felt tears in my eyes and nodded, bringing up my wrist to wipe my face.
“I was thinking, too,” she continued, more calmly. “Why don’t you tell your parents that I want you to stay past dinner to help organize the old papers and records? And that I’ll up your pay a dollar every week? We can read and practice the trapeze.”
“Yes,” I said, unable to look at her now. “I would like that.”
We spent the rest of the day relaxing by the river, weeding the herb garden, and drinking tea over thick books with gold edges. Going home was almost unbearable, but I forced one foot in front of the other, through the square and the fields.
After that everything pretty much went back to normal: the library was open, I worked a little later each day with my parents’ approval, and Mary and I stood side by side stamping the cards and handing the books over to Oakley’s farmers and lovelorn men and women. My body was clean and unbruised. The books Mary had picked out for me all lay safely in a stack under the library’s front desk.
At the same time, everything had changed. Mary treated me differently, less like a child. I became someone she could talk to about adult things—about William, about sex, about the bearded, mustached man who visited her at night, when she couldn’t see him, and didn’t want to. I learned some of the secrets of her heart then, but I know now that I should have gone deeper, and seen all that had happened before.
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