The Weight of Feathers (22 page)

He never saw them come up for air. They must have swum to the edges of the lake, taking their breaths behind rocks. He never saw them scramble either. They moved quickly, easily. They didn’t startle or scatter when the sky flashed, dry lightning that bleached the deepening blue.

The shells and pearls dotting their hair made them look crowned with their own small coral reefs. Light blinked off their bodies like fish scales speckled their skin. Some illusion faked with sequins or paint. The Palomas’ scales didn’t shine like that, not like the sheen of plastic. He knew that now.

The mermaids wove in and out of the sunken trees. They’d turned the drowned branches into their kelp forest. He couldn’t understand it, how the Paloma mermaids swam where two people had drowned. Even if they hated his family, the water had taken a man from theirs too. Their show was no different than if Cluck’s cousins had danced in the trees above a cemetery.

This was where a Corbeau died, a woman who took the name through marriage and who flitted in the trees so well her new family could not believe she wasn’t one of their own. He could almost see her walking those trees that now made up this drowned forest, flowers crowning her head. The sound of the river emptying into the lake was a little like glass chimes.

A mermaid flicked an orange-gold tail. He’d seen enough. Lace wasn’t there.
Les sirènes
swam as though they didn’t notice she was gone.

He walked along the river, following a path of candles burning in old glass jars. The mermaids must have found their way by these. By the time the show ended, they’d have nothing but the iris blue sky and the glow off these small candles.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said a woman’s voice.

He couldn’t find her right away. The light that made the lake glow couldn’t get down through the trees.

He spotted her sitting on a rock, her back straight as a birch trunk.

A loose-knit sweater hung off her. The way the waistband of her skirt cut across her body made her middle look soft. She had small eyes, round and shining like copper pennies. Her hair, thick as Cluck’s wrist, was braided down her back. But she couldn’t have been older than sixty, sixty-five at the most. Her wrinkles were thin and fine as the pleats of wild poppies.

Bright fabric covered her lap. A mermaid tail. She stitched beads on the fin, the moon winking off the needle. How did she sew in so little light? Maybe she worked by touch. The story in his family went that when
Mémère
had cataract surgery, she started crocheting a doily as soon as
Pépère
brought her home, bandages still on her eyes.

“Sorry,” he said.

She kept sewing.

“I’m looking for the pink mermaid,” he said, and cringed. It hadn’t sounded that creepy in his head. Now he was some guy stalking one of their performers.

The woman pulled her face from a slat of light. “She’s not with the show anymore.”

“What happened to her?” he asked.

She tied off the thread. “It’s not your business.”

Pain shot down through his ring finger, so sharp he looked for sparking at the nail. The woman was right. It wasn’t his business. If some tourist came asking where Margaux was, he’d tell him to get lost.

But Margaux had left them to go off with her boyfriend. The Palomas had thrown Lace out, made her an afterfeather like Cluck. Afterfeathers didn’t follow the same grain as remiges. They were smaller and messier than flight and tail feathers. Made of downy barbs, they shot out in different directions, fluffy and unruly.

A few of his aunts had whispered their suspicions that Margaux’s disrespect for the family business would turn her into a crow one day. They told stories of how it had happened before, years ago. A wayward son, a runaway sister, all turned to black-feathered things. But even they would never be afterfeathers. They were whole birds, not extra plumes that broke the line of their own wings.

“Sorry,” Cluck said, this time for asking about the pink mermaid.

He put his hands in his pockets, not remembering his broken finger until it hit the lining seam. He held a grunt at the back of his throat.

The woman looked up. The pinch to her eyelids fell away. The way her stare moved over his hair, his face, his shirt, made him feel like she was cataloguing him, figuring out what specimen jar to put him in.

He stepped back, hands vibrating with the knowledge that he could not fight with his right hand now, or his left. Any second, the woman would scream to call the rest of the family, warning them that a Corbeau had crossed the woods.

She didn’t. Her eyes settled on the collar of his shirt, where a few drops of blood had stained the white.

She shook her head, the light shifting over her face. “What did they do to you?”

“They didn’t,” he said. She probably thought Lace’s cousins had gotten him, and he’d come to finish the fight.

She folded over the costume tail and got up.

He moved back a little slower than she moved forward. She reached him, taking his elbows in her palms. Her stare was so fixed, still even when a moth fluttered between them, that he didn’t pull away.

She could kill him. Holding his elbows could spread the Palomas’ poison through him.

But if he pulled away, if he startled her into thinking he was violent, she’d yell. Lace’s cousins would come kill him themselves.

“You’re a beautiful boy,” the woman said, quiet as the click of the moth’s wings.

She moved her palms to his forearms, and pulled his hands from his pockets. His wrists stiffened. She lightly clasped his fingers, and his muscles settled and stilled.

“You know this, don’t you?” she asked. “That you’re a beautiful boy?”

Her eyes were so round, like the blue spots on a peacock’s tail fan, that for a second he believed it. That he was more than red-stained feathers and three broken fingers.

Four broken fingers. Three on the left, wrecked years ago. One on the right, the break new. The bones in his right ring finger floated like glass shards in water.

If Lace had told the truth, if this family had locked her out for that scar, this woman hadn’t done it. If there was that kind of malice in her, he would have felt it in his finger. The weight would have ground down his knuckle joint.

She put her arms around him. He tensed. She held onto him, but didn’t tighten her hold.

The scent of her pressed into him. She smelled like halved apples and the new metal of sewing needles and a little like cinnamon. Remembering
Mémère
’s picture, those watercolor eyes and light Alsatian braids, turned this woman’s scent to lavender, the shells of pale green eggs, those doilies his grandmother crocheted from when she ten until she died.

Mémère
would have hugged him this way, if he’d been born soon enough to know her. But she’d died years before, so all he had was guessing.

The tension didn’t leave, but it shrank, pulled its branches back into its heartwood. He shut his eyes.

His finger hurt so much he bit down, and his lip opened again.

He pulled away. The woman let him.

“Thank you,” he said.

The woman pressed her lips together, and went back to her sewing.

He left looking over his shoulder. The woman didn’t look at him. She stared into the dark, moving her needle without watching it.

He still had to get the milk. Without it, there’d be questions about where he’d gone. He couldn’t go by the liquor mart again. That left the grocery store. So he walked to the wide parking lot it shared with a twenty-four-hour donut shop and a boarded-up storefront that once sold vacuums.

The thought of the grocery store’s fluorescents made him cringe. He’d feel their hum and buzz in his broken ring finger. But he walked, and the crackling in that small bone faded.

He peeled off the three rings of white tape on his right hand.

He curled his right fingers into a fist. He folded them down, and spread them out. His ring finger came with the rest, closing until his fingertips met his palm. Then it opened with them, stretched out straight as the woman’s needle.

The three wrecked fingers on his left hand stayed curled under, stuck closed. But the right one worked like Dax had never touched it.

Cluck could still feel
la magie noire
from the Paloma woman’s hands. It shivered from his healed finger to the rest of his body. He could feel his blood carrying it to every part of him, turning him into something even darker and more dangerous than what he’d been born.

De noche, todos los gatos son pardos.

At night, all cats are black.

A woman stuck her head out of the donut shop door. “You want to come in?”

“Thanks,” Lace said. “I’m okay.”

The woman stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Come on. Four times out of five the bus is late. No reason to stand out here.” She tilted her head toward the few tables inside. “They don’t mind.”

Lace came in and sat down. The girl at the register kept looking over at her. She glanced up after wiping down the counter, then after taking down her hair and fixing it up again.

It might have been a look for not buying anything. But Lace didn’t think she could stomach the coffee, so strong she could taste it in the air, or the few donuts left at this time of night, each with a sheen of hours-old grease. So she went up to the register and bought two coffee refills, one for the woman and another for the man she was sitting with. They both thanked her, whispered
my goodness, what a nice girl.

The cashier kept looking over. She consolidated almost-empty bakery trays, and eyed Lace. She took apart a ballpoint pen that wouldn’t write, and looked over again.

Lace looked back at her. She found the girl’s face open and wide, the pink of a favorite prom dress.

This wasn’t mean staring. The girl couldn’t help it. Lace had forgotten the red on her cheek, deep and wet as pomegranate seeds.

The couple couldn’t help it either. They whispered between glances over to Lace’s table.

Then, around the time the cashier started drawing on napkins, the couple stopped whispering.

“You’re one of the mermaids,” the woman said.

Lace uncrossed her arms.

“We brought our granddaughter to see your show,” the man said. “We took her picture with you.”

“I don’t think so,” Lace said. She’d been in plenty of shows this summer, but had only taken pictures with the tourists once, the one night
Abuela
had promoted her. The night of the accident. The one time little girls studied the fin of her tail, wondering if it felt like a fish’s scales.

“You were the pink one, weren’t you?” The woman rested an elbow on the table, her hand in the smoke blue of her perm. “She said you were the prettiest mermaid.”

It never had anything to do with how pretty Lace or her cousins were. It was always about what tail they wore. Pink must have been their granddaughter’s favorite color. If a girl liked orange or gold, she called Martha the best mermaid. If she liked blue-green, it would be Emilia, with all those sea-colored pearls glittering in her hair.

The little girl Lace put makeup on had declared she’d wear a purple dress when she grew up and joined the show, so she would’ve picked Alexia, for that tail as purple as field milkwort.

Lace said thank you anyway. Moving her mouth knocked tears from the corners of her eyes. Twin drops fell, one from each lash line. The first traced a smooth trail. The other caught on the raw skin of her burn. The salt seared her cheek.

The man and woman’s kindness hurt. It made her hunch her shoulders and round her back.

She’d had one night as a mermaid close enough for posed pictures. At least someone would remember it. The little girl wouldn’t. She was too young. But her grandparents would. One day they’d pull the snapshot from an old album and remind her of when they took her to see mermaids.

Maybe they’d gone to see the fairies too. Lace didn’t ask.

She ran her fingers over her forearm, feeling the change in texture when they crossed the feather burn. For now it felt rougher, sand-coated. It would heal smooth, like dried amber. She held it to her mouth and kissed it, stroked it with her thumb. She clutched it against her body, let it spark through her. It kept her heart charged and alive.

The bus rolled into the parking lot. The groan of the brakes finished so high that Lace, the couple, and the cashier all flinched.

“That’s yours,” the cashier said. She smiled at them, even Lace, no shame from staring. Maybe she didn’t realize she had been. Lace was a junk thing on a road. A lost hubcap, or one of the strips of tire tread her father called
los cocodrilos
.

Lace got the door for the couple and their rolling suitcases, and then followed.

Clouds had turned the sky to pewter. A mist of water hit her skin.

She stopped, felt the drops sticking to her, dissolving her dress, turning her to wet silt.

The distance to the bus opened. It wasn’t the graded shelf of a lake where the sun reached the mud. It was a steep drop-off, where everything floated into the dark.

She backed toward the donut shop.

The woman caught her arm. “Don’t worry, just a little water. If my hair can take it, so can yours.”

Lace tried pulling away.

They had to feel it, the rain searing them. The woman’s blouse, printed with flowers big as hydrangeas, must have been some kind of cotton. Those flowers would fall to pieces, burning her skin underneath.

The woman tightened her grip. “They won’t wait,” she warned. “This town’s a nothing little stop to them. We had to make noise for them to keep it on their route.”

The man put a hand on Lace’s back. “Come on,” he said, and she remembered his voice, him talking to his granddaughter.
Stand right there. Smile, Sierra
.

Lace tried pulling on the woman’s arm. “We have to go,” she said, her voice not breaking a whisper. “We have to run.”

“Nobody’s running,” the woman said. “They know we’re coming. But if you go back inside, they’ll leave without you.”

Lace put her whole throat behind her voice.
We have to run
. But nothing came out this time, not even that weak whisper.