The Weight of Feathers (10 page)

The air in the room felt cool and thick as water. It rushed around her, clothed her like kelp ribbons. She touched her hair to check if it was floating. She felt the weight of shells and river pearls holding her breasts. By refusing to be burned away, those
escamas
had written these things onto her body. They were new birthmarks, unseen but true.

Salt stung the wound on her cheek. She pressed the pads of her fingers to the tear’s path. The Corbeau boy had touched her. The rain had scalded her. But nothing in those drops or in his fingers could take the name Paloma from her.

She put her dress back on and threw the door open. She called for her mother and her father and
Abuela
and
Tía
Lora. Aunts, uncles, and cousins cracked their doors and peered out.

Apanchanej
had given her a sign she would be healed. The garnet would fall from her cheek like flecks of mica. The crushed roses on her back and breasts would turn to skin again. She would swim. She would still be
la sirena rosa
.

“What is it,
mija
?” her mother asked, shaking painkillers from a bottle. Lace held her hand out to stop her.

Her fingers froze before they reached her mother’s. A dark wisp of a mark on her forearm made her still. A burn, deep and red as a crushed blackberry, fanned in the shape of a feather, the barbs as clear as scratches of ink.

She’d missed that feather. Maybe the reddening and swelling had hidden it. Or she’d dismissed it as dried blood. Or the burn on her cheek kept her staring into the mirror instead of looking down.

But she saw it now.

Her mother saw it too. The pills and bottle fell from her hand.

Lace’s aunts whispered prayers. Her cousins drew back, as though Lace had cut her hands on the thorns of
la Virgen Morena
’s roses. They all saw it, the messy, fluffy barbs seared into her arm.

The Corbeau boy’s feather had scarred her. It had fallen from him and branded her. Now she wore the mark of the family who’d killed
Tía
Lora’s husband. The net the Corbeau boy left for her would not let her go.

If the feather’s imprint had been light, the pearled skin of a healed scar or the family’s birthmarks, her aunts and uncles might not have drawn back. Her mother might not have hovered a nervous hand in front of her mouth. But this was the enemy family’s mark. They knew it as well as if a thousand obsidian feathers had fallen from the sky.

Lace’s father stepped between them all. “
¡Santo cielo!
” He took Lace’s arm. “It’s just a feather. You don’t know it’s theirs.”

But to the rest of them, it was currency, true as salt and silver. Lace felt the poison seeping into her blood. She should have noticed it before, felt the sting of that family’s venom.

Her father watched her.
Abuela
watched her. Her mother stepped back toward the yellowing wallpaper. The rest of the family fringed the hallway.

Abuela
turned her back to them all. She went to the door of her room. One glance told Lace to follow.

“Lace,” her father said, his assurance that, once, just once, she did not have to do as
Abuela
told her.

Lace’s calves pulsed, fighting her moving.
Don’t go,
her muscles crackled out.
You know how this will end. Don’t go.

But she shook off the feeling biting up her legs and followed.

The rest of the family let out a shared breath. When
Abuela
gave an order, any Paloma girl who did not want to become another Licha obeyed.

A quien dices tus secretos, das tu libertad.

To whom you tell your secrets, you give your freedom.

Lace closed the door behind her, shutting out the hallway murmurs.

Abuela
faced the window, back to Lace. “At the hospital the nurses talk about how some
gitano
boy pulled a girl from the woods. But I said not my granddaughter.”

“
Abuela,
” Lace said.

“I said my granddaughter is
una niña buena
. If my granddaughter had been touched by one of them, she would have told us. She would have let us help her.”

“Help me?” A laugh pressed up from under the two strained words. “What would you have done?”
Exorcismo?
Brought her to a
bruja
who would push the breath out of her?

“Was that you with the
gitano
boy?”
Abuela
asked.

“He didn’t know who I was,” Lace said.

“Was that you?”
Abuela
asked again.

Lace would not say yes.
Abuela
already knew. She just wanted to make her say it.

“Those people killed my big brother,”
Abuela
said.

The words dragged Lace’s gaze to the floor. So often she thought of the Paloma who died that night as
Tía
Lora’s husband, the man who made Lace’s great-aunt a Paloma. She sometimes forgot he was also
Abuela
’s brother. When the lake flooded its shores, and he drowned, he was lost not only to
Tía
Lora but to
Abuela
.

Her grandmother turned from the window. The scent of her reached out to Lace. For more than half a century, she’d worn the same perfume her mother gave her on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother had scraped together enough for a tiny bottle, no bigger than a jar of saffron, and
Abuela
had saved up for a new one each year ever since.
Cream Lace
. Lace’s mother had named her for that perfume, a gift to
Abuela,
a sign that Lace belonged as much to
Abuela
as to her mother and father.

The powdery smell of violets and almond sugar curled around Lace’s shoulders. Such a sweet scent, shy and young. How did it stand up to
Abuela
’s wrists and neck?

Now
Abuela
’s face was soft as that scent, and almost as sad. “Pack your things,
mija
.”

The words were the slap Lace had expected. She’d braced for them. They jolted her anyway.

Lace turned her forearm, letting the light glaze over the burn. If she fought
Abuela
on this, everyone would know she had been touched.
Abuela
would tell them all. She would be the cursed thing, a burr hooking its teeth into this family.

Abuela
had only just let her be seen.
La sirena rosa
had come to shore for one night, and then had slipped back into the water. Now she could bring a plague on her family, sure as crows making children sick. It didn’t matter that
Apanchanej
had spared her scales. She had let a Corbeau touch her.

A flush of shame gripped her, strong as the Corbeau boy’s hands.

“Don’t tell them,” Lace said.

“They saw it already.”

“Don’t tell them how I got it.”

Her grandmother said nothing.

Lace had obeyed. Her whole life, she’d obeyed. She’d done makeup for all the
sirenas,
even when it meant she couldn’t finish her own. She’d hidden her
escamas
even though they were the part of her body she loved most, all because
Abuela
was sure people would call her and her cousins
los monstruos
if their scales ever showed.

Lace kept her feet flat on the carpet. If she didn’t steady her own weight, she’d waver and sound desperate.
Abuela
would stick a knife through any break in her voice.

“What have you ever asked me to do that I haven’t done?” Lace asked.

Abuela
tipped her eyes to the curtains, studying the mismatched panels.

“If you don’t tell them how I got it, I’ll do what you want, I’ll go,” Lace said. Not a question. An equation, sure and immutable as the ones on her father’s worksheets.

Abuela
turned her head, half-shutting her eyes. She knew what Lace meant.
Listen to me, or I will make this messy. I will be a pain in your ass.

“My dad will go against you on this,” Lace said. “You know that. If you promise you won’t tell them, I’ll convince him. He’ll let me go.”

Abuela
kept her laugh behind her lips. “You can take him with you. He has the name for it.”

Lace flinched.
Abuela
had never forgiven Lace’s father for being born with the last name Cuervo, even after he let it go, changed it, endured the taunting of other men for taking his wife’s name.

She shrugged it away. She needed
Abuela
’s word. She could not have her mother and her father, and Martha and Matías, and the other
sirenas,
knowing she’d had
gitano
hands on her.

“If he goes with me, so will my mother,” Lace said.

Abuela
lifted her chin.

“Don’t tell them,” Lace said. Even if her father took her side, and her mother took his, her mother would never look at her the same way. She would see the feather on her arm as a mark of her sin,
un testamento
of what she had let the gypsy boy do. Maybe she’d even think Lace wanted it, wanted him.

Abuela
didn’t know about the net. If Lace told her now, it would sound like something she’d made up, a lie to explain why she was still out in the woods when the sky fell. To cover that she was meeting the Corbeau boy in the woods, letting him touch her, not knowing his last name. Or worse, knowing it, letting him put his hands on her anyway.

“Please,” Lace said.

Her grandmother said nothing.

“Please,” Lace said again, desperation spreading through the word like a stain.

“Fine,”
Abuela
said, startled.

“What will you tell them?”

“That one of the feathers found you. Is this good enough for you,
princesa
?”

“Thank you,” Lace said.

Her father caught her outside
Abuela
’s door. “Lace.” He stopped her, a hand over her forearm, like covering the mark would make it mean nothing. Like the rest of the family were children who would forget what they could not see.

He already knew what
Abuela
had said. The tightness in his face told her.

“Your
mamá
and I will go with you,” he said.

It was easy for him. The show was nothing. He could shake it all away like sand from a rug. He’d married Lace’s mother to be her husband, not to be a Paloma.

Lace wished it could be so easy for her, that she could shed the feather burn like he had shed his name.

Lace held the truth cupped tight in her palms. It fought and fluttered like a moth, but she would not part her fingers enough to let it out.

“You didn’t want me in the show forever.” She searched the words for wavering, smoothed them out with her hands like an iron. “I have my GED. I can register at any of the county colleges.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” her father said. “
No me importa nada
. Screw this family.”

If Lace let that happen,
Abuela
would lay out the full story. How much did
Abuela
know? That there’d been nothing left of her dress but scraps of fabric? That the Corbeau boy hadn’t had a shirt on, that Lace’s skin had been on his?

Lace stood close enough to her father so he could hear her whisper. “If you go with me, none of my cousins will learn anything.”

A wince flashed across his face. It was cruel, striking at the thing he cared about most.

“Half of them need summer school,” she said. “You’re the one who teaches them.” Her father took on the bulk of the homeschooling. Without him, no one would get a GED. “If you don’t stay, they won’t learn.”

Sadness weighted his eyebrows. He would never win against
Abuela,
or Lace’s mother, who had said her piece by saying nothing. Now her mother stood at the other end of the hall, her sisters and cousins keeping close as sepals around an anemone.

They were already backing away from the girl with the feather. She was a wounded thing. If they kept her, her blood would draw more of the Corbeaus’
magia negra
.

“And where will you go?” her father asked.

Guilt flared through her burns, the feeling of getting too near a radiator. “Martha’s friends in Tulare County,” she said. “I can stay with them.”

“You’re better than this,” he said. “Don’t let
las supersticiones
force you to do anything.”

“Nobody’s forcing me,” Lace whispered, the lie stinging her tongue. “I’m getting out like you always wanted.”

Hesitation deepened the wrinkles around his mouth.

But he said, “Good,” loud enough to make sure everyone heard.

So he let her go, and the truth of why he was letting her go pressed into the back of her neck. He had never wanted this life for her. Motel rooms strung together like beads. School squeezed in between sewing costumes.
Abuela
’s tongue, heavy as a gavel.

La sirena rosa
was not her name, not to him. Her dreams of Weeki Wachee were only good enough to him because
Abuela
was not in Florida, telling her maybe she was spending too much time with her math books.

If this was how he could make her more than the fabric and beads of her tail, he would do it. She didn’t know how to tell him that she’d loved her tail as much as her own skin and hair.

She went back to her room and found Martha sitting on the bed, waiting. “You’re not really gonna go stay with my friends in Terra Bella, are you?”

Lace cleared her clothes from the middle drawer.

“Where are you gonna go?” Martha asked.

“You think we’re the only mermaids?” Lace said. “They’ve got shows like us in Vegas, Atlantic City. Not just Florida.”

“Vegas?” Martha laughed. “What are you gonna do, steal my driver’s license? You couldn’t even get into a casino.”

“What about those dives in the middle of the desert?” Lace asked. They’d passed one last summer. A woman caked with waterproof foundation flipped and turned in an oversized fish tank, her plastic tail glittering. The family had stopped because they were hungry, but
Abuela
took one look in the door and wouldn’t go in. She said she wouldn’t sit and watch some old, fat fish-woman swimming around.