The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Eugenie felt him pulling away, and held his arm harder. “We’re not worth anything to anyone here. We don’t even have names. We’re just les gitans, right?”

  He cringed. She’d heard everything the girl said. And like him, she’d heard gitan when the girl said gitano.

  Eugenie shook her head and shrugged. “So why bother?”

  Si quieres tener enemigos, haz favores.

  If you want to make enemies, do favors.

  El gitano. She’d touched him, held ice to his bruises. The liquor store’s salt and sugar smells came back. They crept down to her stomach. She turned onto her side, fighting off the sick feeling.

  Her cousins hadn’t known what he was either. If they’d been beating up a Corbeau, Justin would’ve told her, knowing Lace couldn’t have said a word. Fighting was the only way to touch a Corbeau without taking on their curse. His Corbeau blood was the thing about him Justin didn’t like, even if he couldn’t name it.

  It was worse than her helping him up and putting ice to his temple. He’d gotten her out from under that tree, to here. How much touching had that taken?

  But she knew now. That feather had told her.

  A nurse in green scrubs tried to put her IV back.

  “No,” Lace cried out, wrenching her arm from the woman’s grasp. “No, I don’t want it.”

  She wasn’t letting them make her numb to how the Corbeau boy had touched her. How he’d left that net for her, even if he didn’t know she was the one he’d left it for. There was no other reason for him to be in that part of the woods. He’d set a trap for las sirenas and then saved her only because he didn’t know she was one of them.

  “He did it,” she tried to tell the nurse, but the nurse didn’t listen. “It was him.”

  The nurse got a better grip.

  “I don’t want it.” Lace jerked her elbow away. Her forearm banged the bed rail.

  The nurse dropped her arm. “Fine.”

  So Lace lay there, needleless, seething at the knowledge that she had touched him, he had touched her, that her body had been against his.

  The stick site prickled. The longer she had the needle out, the worse her skin stung. It shrieked with the burns and the stain of the gitano boy’s hands.

  When she got so thirsty she couldn’t swallow, the nurse told her she needed to take the IV again, that she wasn’t ready to drink water.

  Lace said no. After the nurse left, she drained the pitcher next to the bed. But then it was empty, and she was still thirsty. So she stumbled to the bathroom sink without turning on the light, and drank from the tap.

  As soon as she swallowed, the water came up again, yellowed with stomach acid.

  The nurse flicked on the light. The overhead fluorescent bleached her blond hair white. “You want it back in yet?”

  Lace shook her head. Pain shot through the muscles above her jaw, and she threw up the last of the water.

  “All right, girly,” the nurse said. “Have it your way.” She flipped the lamp off.

  Lace ran water down the sink. The changes in light made her forehead throb.

  The mirror showed a face reddened like a half-ripened apricot. The skin was tight in places, gathered like rippling water in others. The right cheek looked bloody as a garnet, but her fingers found it dry, rough as sandstone.

  Her hospital gown gaped away from her body. The cotton billowed, showing her shoulders, her breasts, all the way to her thighs.

  Her family might never see the blight the boy left on her. These burns veiled it. Abuela and her mother might never know if a Corbeau touching her had seared off her escamas. Lace wouldn’t look, but she knew. The rain had already burned them away.

  A nurse, the blue one this time, pulled her away from the mirror. “Come on, honey.” She slipped the needle in, taped it down. Lace took it, and the fishless water made her sleepy, quiet, less likely to climb over the guardrail.

  A square of fabric sat on the nightstand. Filmy, printed with roses, folded. The scarf she’d forgotten in the boy’s hands, when melting ice soaked it.

  She balled it up and threw it. It fluttered to a chair and then slipped to the floor.

  Her hand knocked a milk bottle she hadn’t noticed. It stood at the back of the nightstand, bursting with wildflowers. The dusk blue of bachelor buttons. The white and yellow roses that grew wild on the hillsides. Red blossoms like blooms of flame.

  She must’ve looked even worse than she thought. Nobody in her family brought flowers to hospitals unless someone was dying or having a baby.

  Her fingers worried the tape on her IV as she slept.

  The purple nurse came back, woke her up, tried to get her to eat. Lace shook her head at the plate, because everything tasted like her dry lips.

  The nurse ripped off the tape encircling Lace’s elbow. “Your friend went home?” she asked.

  Lace tasted the grit of her own dry tongue. “He’s not my friend.”

  “Oh, yeah? He ripped up a quarter acre of Spanish broom to get you free.”

  And she’d kept her cousins from kicking his ass. It didn’t make them friends.

  What curse had he left on her? What maldición were her burns hiding?

  She’d throw ice cubes at the next nurse who tried to tell her “that boy saved your life.” They didn’t know anything about the Corbeaus. If they did, they’d never let them past the town lines.

  The knowledge that his hands had been on her kept clawing through her skin. Maybe her family would leave her here, like starlings abandoning a nest, the sky blue of their eggs tainted by a child’s fingers.

  Lace felt for the tips of her hair. They should have been at her waist. Instead, the ends bunched above her breasts. She was missing almost a foot of her hair.

  The nurse drew a vial’s contents into a syringe.

  “What is that?” Lace asked.

  “You’ll thank me later,” the nurse said.

  Lace squinted against the sun. It crawled up, a blind at a time, sharpening the light, and she slept.

  She woke to her mother and Abuela whispering. But she couldn’t open her eyes, and they did not notice the twitch of her eyelashes.

  “She’ll heal,” said her mother’s voice.

  “I can’t put her back in the show,” Abuela said. “Not looking like this.”

  “That’s what you’re thinking of?” Her mother huffed out a breath through her nose, like air wisping from a tire. “Whether you have your sirena?”

  Abuela gripped a handful of Lace’s hair, the smell of her perfume warm off her wrist. Even the slight pulling tugged at Lace’s scalp, lighting up the roots.

  “What will she do?” Abuela asked. “Wear a wig into the water?”

  Pain fanned out through Lace’s head, and the voices flickered to nothing, like a bulb burning out.

  Lace opened her eyes to her father’s hands leaving a clean dress folded on the bedside table. She recognized his hands without seeing his face, those calluses from soldering resistors at a maquiladora so he could save up enough money for school.

  She tried to speak, tried to reach out to those hands. But her own hands were so heavy she could not lift them. He patted the dress, as though telling it not to go anywhere, kissed Lace’s hair, and then was gone.

  She woke up scratching at her own skin, dreaming of rain. She dragged her fingers over her arms, trying to get the drops off. But it kept falling, and took her under.

  The next time she opened her eyes, Tía Lora stood over her, mouthing a prayer. Her tongue flashed between her teeth, like soap in the ring of a bubble wand.

  Her hands clutched a ball of pink cloth. Every time her fingers tightened or loosened their grip, the fabric shimmered like the inside of a conch shell.

  Lace couldn’t move enough to cry, so the trembling stuck at the back of her throat. This poor woman. All she’d wanted was a child, and she’d lost two, each before they could be born. Both had slipped from her womb like water. Then the Corbeaus had killed her husband before they
could try again. So Tía Lora made the younger Palomas her children. She taught Oscar to make foghorn sounds by blowing into empty soda bottles. She showed Reyna and Leti how to tweeze their eyebrows, not so much, so they wouldn’t look surprised the way their mother always did.

  And Lace. She had taught Lace to sew, to bead. To make corn and hot water and sugar into atole that made her younger cousins sleep. To love dry lightning as much as candles in glass jars. “Because for one second, all that light, you see everything. Maybe you don’t know what you’ve seen, but you’ve seen it, and it goes with you.”

  Los enemigos del hombre son los de su propia casa.

  A man’s enemies are those of his own house.

  The girl in the car’s side mirror looked both drowned and burned.

  Lace raised her hand to her face. So did the girl. They both traced fingers over their foreheads and noses. Lips, and glue-stiff eyebrows. Left cheek, then right. The features were the same, shapes they both knew, but the feel had changed, some spots rough as salt, others smooth and raw.

  She wanted to tell her father about the Corbeau boy touching her, so he could tell her it was alright, that after a week’s worth of showers she wouldn’t even remember. Her father never stood for superstitions. He had changed his last name only because his own meant something so hateful none of the Palomas would say it. He put little stock in las patrañas y los cuentos de viejas, the fairy stories and old wives’ tales that ruled this family. To Barto Paloma, the Corbeaus’ feathers and the Palomas’ scales were just aberrations in biology, no different than an algae bloom lighting up the ocean like opals.

  But the shame of el gitano holding her in his arms, taking her from the woods, her body against his chest, pressed down on her. She couldn’t say it, not even to her father.

  “Martha missed you,” her father said. “She says a couple nights in that room alone is enough.”

  “A couple nights?” Lace asked. It had felt like a week, two.

  Lace picked at a cut on her lower lip. So did the girl. The morphine wore off, and both Lace and the girl stared, each wondering how the other had gotten so ugly.

  Her father parked the station wagon in the motel lot. Her family waited in the lobby. They all offered stiff hugs, hands only, space between their bodies. Except Tía Lora, who pulled her close and whispered, “You look beautiful, mija.” And Martha, la sirena anaranjada, who combed her hands through Lace’s hair and said, “Don’t worry, I kept the boys out of fights for you.” And Lace’s mother, who gripped her so hard pain pulsed through her body. “You’re fine,” her mother whispered. “You’re just fine.”

  Lace’s younger cousins asked was it true that she’d gotten glued to the ground, and was it true that a ghost unstuck her. “People saw him,” Reyna and Leti’s little sister said. “But then he just disappeared,” Emilia’s five-year-old son said.

  Lace shushed them, not wanting anyone to think too hard about how she’d gotten to the hospital.

  When they thought she wasn’t looking, her uncles shook their heads at the lobby carpet. Her aunts dabbed at their lower eyelids, as though she’d died.

  Their pity filled her arms and made her tired. She carried it back to her and Martha’s room, wavering under the weight.

  Lace took off her dress and caught her reflection in the turned-off television. In the dark glass, she almost looked the same. Her mother’s nose, her father’s straight brow bone, her middle aunt’s sloped shoulders.

  She turned. Even in the dim glass, her back looked covered with brandy rose petals, crushed and half-withered. But a handful of clean, pale coins still arced across her lower back. Las escamas. The scales that marked her as a mermaid.

  She went to the bathroom mirror, turning her back to the glass. The birthmarks shined in the overhead light. Almost iridescent. The burning rain had left them raw and a little pink, but no scars crossed them.

  They’d been spared, as though Apanchanej’s own fingers had shielded them. The rain should have burned her escamas as badly as her cheek. But they were still on her, whole and unmarred, proof that she would live and swim, reach her hands through the sheets of light that floated through the river, turn her body in the same spring as Abuela.

  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.