A circus is all about illusion, wonder, people lining up to see something impossible. For most circusgoers, wonder is the goal.
For me, it’s the beginning. All the illusions ever did was dare me to find out why and how.
I longed to be a Lampton’s girl, but I was terrified of leaving the circus behind. The truth was, though, I found it stifling. That crush of people around us all the time, the performers and crew and crowds and crowds and again more crowds, and Mama calling each and every one of them family. Mama had room for all of them in her heart, down to every last audience member. She loved them as soon as they entered the fairground or came into the tent. Sometimes I thought Mama’s heart must look like a playbill, but I told myself Rosie and I were her headliners.
When I left for school, I wanted for once to headline my own life.
Rosie and I had shared every second of our lives with the entire Circus Rose, not to mention with each other. I had no idea who I would be if I were by myself—not a twin, not a daughter, not part of a crew.
Just Ivory.
The thing is, even my name isn’t simply my own. It’s a duet with my sister’s.
Ivory and Rosie, named for the colors of our hair when we were born.
I came first, with hardly a cry at all, a coily nimbus of white on my crown, a serious look on my face.
Rosie followed two minutes later, squalling fit to break glass, her hair a bright slick of red that Mama thought at first was only more blood from the birthing.
For just those two minutes, we were both alone, Rosie and I. I spent them thinking, and she spent them frightened.
That about sums up how each of us feels about solitude.
Mama had planned to name her baby Rose, boy or girl, after the circus she’d so proudly founded. She did not expect two babies, but when she saw us, she thrilled to the prospect of our double act, picturing the posters already.
She chose our names the same way she would have if we’d come to her looking for a paying gig: she named us what would draw a crowd. She drew an equal sign between us with our names, one that said we were the same even as it showcased our difference.
White-haired Ivory, red-haired Rosie. Gentle and quiet, fiery and bright.
Snow White. Rose Red.
We are different. We are the same.
I dreamed, and was afraid, of breaking free.
But at fourteen years old, standing at the front door of the engineering school, Mama’s hand in mine for what would be the last time until the end of the school year, I felt something I had never felt before.
I knew what it would mean to leave my family, and I felt guilty—about leaving Mama, to be sure, but even more about leaving Rosie.
Rosie’s never had an easy time in the world, you see, for all the joy she takes in performing. Too much of that light and sound she loves, too much brightness and noise, too much of anything pushing in at her senses for too long overwhelms her, and her mind—it just panics. Her thoughts retreat in on themselves until she can’t speak, until she can’t understand anything that’s being said to her, either.
The only cure for Rosie, once she’s frozen in overwhelm like that, is to go somewhere dark and quiet, and to rest there for a long time, maybe hours, maybe a day, with someone she loves. Not ever alone.
Since the day we were born, that person was me—even before then. After all, we shared a womb before we were ourselves. I was always the person who was best at bringing Rosie back to the world, at lying patient and still with her in the dark and breathing slowly enough that she would start to match her breath to mine.
At least, I was best at it until Bear.
2
Rosie
Bear came
to me
from the north.
We were so
young, Ivory and I,
round cheeked,
baby bellied:
young enough that we
weren’t yet ourselves
to anyone else.
“The girls,” “the twins,”
two buds on one
branch. Just seven
summers old.
Ivory was only
another me
until the day
a beast came
in from the cold.
At the edge
of the campfire light,
Bear rose.
The troupe,
to the last,
fled.
Even Ivory. Even Mama.
Trying their best
to pull me along.
But I,
I alone,
would not be kept away.
I made Bear
a shy curtsey
at the fire’s edge.
Bear bowed in reply.
I held out my small
child’s hand.
Bear took my palm
in one great paw
and kissed it
clean. A murmur bloomed
from the shadows around us,
wondering applause.
Mama exclaimed:
“Why, he’s tame as a pet!
Just what the Circus
Rose needs.” Ever
since, Bear has danced
or played the beast
in all our acts—
though of course,
Bear’s and mine
are the best.
My heart still holds
its first sight of Bear:
the looming, warm
weight, dark as chocolate,
lush and sweet.
A warren of fur,
a heavy
embrace.
A body that felt
at once to me
like home,
even though I could see
it was not home to
her.
Ivory
Rosie used to turn old circus flyers into paper crowns for Bear. She’d place them carefully on his narrow skull and then cry when she took her hands away and the crown fell off.
Every night, a paper crown, cut out while Rosie did her splits and stretches, her legs akimbo behind her while her hands fiddled with the scissors. Bear’s huge bulk made a brown crescent moon behind Rosie. When we went to bed, Bear would go into his cage, but that was really just to keep up appearances: Bear could work the latch himself, though that was a secret only a few of us knew. Everyone who had been with the circus more than a month knew how tame and devoted Bear was.
Every night I watched Rosie and Bear from across the campfire, until, one night, I couldn’t stand it anymore. We were nine, and the circus was wintering down in the Sudlands, where the snow never came. The circles of caravans and tents where the cast and crew usually slept were empty; we all slept under the stars whenever we came this far south. I pushed myself up and stomped across the warm sand.
Vera turned away from her two current paramours to watch me; the rest of the cast and crew were too busy savoring a little leisure time to pay any attention.
“Here!” I said, snatching the scissors from Rosie and taking another flyer from the snowdrift of them that had just come off of Toro’s portable printing press.
“Hey!” Toro cried, but I gave him the sweetest and saddest look I could—the one that Mama was always saying proved I had a bit of showboat blood in me yet—and he smiled crookedly.