The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  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.

  “If I can hold my breath and twirl around in a tank, I can get a job,” Lace said.

  The wildflowers from her hospital nightstand sat on the dresser, half-withered.

  Palomas only brought flowers to hospitals when someone either had a baby or was so close to death the priest was on his way.

  “Did you all give me up for dead?” Lace asked.

  “Of course not,” Martha said. “Why?”

  Lace picked up the milk bottle. “Then why these?”

  “We didn’t bring you those,” Martha said.

  “You didn’t?”

  “Should we have?” Martha looked hard at Lace’s middle. “Are you pregnant?”

  “No.” Lace set the bottle back on the dr
esser. “If you didn’t bring them, who did?”

  “The nurse said the guy who brought you in, but I don’t know. I never saw him.”

  The feeling of the Corbeau boy’s hands rushed over Lace’s body. It whipped against her like blown sand.

  The cornflowers. Outside the liquor store, he’d had one on his vest. It came unpinned and fell when her cousin hit him.

  Wild roses. Red blossoms. The orange-haired Corbeau girl Lace had seen by the river wore them on her head. They grew wild on the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, those undaunted blooms that carpeted the abandoned campground.

  El gitano. The gypsy boy brought her the wildflowers.

  He didn’t know the girl he’d taken out of the woods was a sirena he’d set a trap for. He didn’t know when he was freeing her from the brush that she’d just escaped his net. All he knew was that he’d saved her life, and she’d called him names. He’d brought her flowers, and she’d chased him out of the room.

  Now he was angry with her. This was no different than Justin and Alexia and her brother stealing the Camargue and being cursed with the skittishness of young horses.

  She had to get the Corbeau boy’s forgiveness, like returning that stolen colt.

  A soft knock clicked against the door. Lace left her clothes on the bed and answered it.

  Tía Lora stood in the hall, hands full of fabric pink as a grapefruit, the cloth she’d brought with her to the hospital. It glinted, sagging with the weight of glass beads.

  A new cola de sirena, a mermaid tail made to replace the one that had been lost.

  Lace wondered if shreds of her old one still clung to that colander, the current pulling them like streamers.

  This one was finer than the lost one, the beading more intricate, the embroidery on the fin tighter, more delicate. A sign of Tía Lora’s faith that she would swim again.

  “You will come back,” Tía Lora said.

  Lace had to find the gitano boy.

  Tía Lora set the tail’s weight in her palms, the thread still warm from her hands.

  Lace took it. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

  Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.

  One that you hold is better than two you will have.

  Cluck braced his hands on the worktable. Half the wings still needed fixing. Alula feathers had gotten knocked out of place. Primary remiges had come loose, secondaries had fallen out. Wires had gotten bent or snapped; they’d snagged on branches when his cousins came down from the trees. Some the chemical rain had ruined.

  Cluck watched from the trailer window as a woman in a skirt suit met his mother at the back door.

  He knew why the woman was there. He could tell by the chamber of commerce pin on her lapel. The Almendro Blackberry Festival would go on. Calling off those days of farm stands and crafters’ booths would be the same as a white flag, a sign that the town had curled up in its corner of the Central Valley to die.

  Now she’d come to find out if Nicole Corbeau felt the same way.

  His mother kissed the air next to the woman’s cheek.

  Cluck rolled his eyes. His mother did that with anyone they needed to issue them permits. It always charmed them, made them walk away a little lighter, feeling sophisticated, unbearably French.

  Great. Not only were they staying in this town, now the Palomas would too.

  They should’ve just moved on to Madera County a couple of weeks early. Or scheduled a stop on the Monterey Peninsula, where slices of the ocean showed between the trees.

  But his mother wasn’t willing to burn bridges. No more than she was willing to let the Palomas win.

  Cluck couldn’t wait to save up enough money for community college, for an apartment that didn’t move. He’d study like his grandfather had. He’d get a job anywhere but Almendro. He’d get a house he and Pépère could live in, and Pépère wouldn’t have to go around with the show anymore. They’d be les célibataires, two bachelors in a house with a lemon tree.

  Eugenie came in without knocking. Cluck let her get at the old mirror against the wall so she could check her feathers. Some Corbeaus, like Dax, pulled all theirs out. Most, like Eugenie, just checked for loose ones before each show. They never wanted the audience to sees feathers fall from their heads.

  “You didn’t go see that girl again, did you?” Eugenie asked.

  “Right. Because she was so thrilled to see me last time.”

  Eugenie ran her fingers through her hair. “What was she so upset about?”

  “I don’t know.” Probably him. A lot of people got upset about him.

  “Did you tell her what happened?” Eugenie asked.

  He cleaned the adhesive off a set of wire cutters.

  “Do you know her?” Eugenie asked.

  He straightened a few bent wires.

  “Who is she?” she asked.

  He threw down the wire. “I don’t want to talk about this, Eugenie.”

  Eugenie pulled a last feather. “You’re cranky today, n’est-ce pas?”

  “You think?” Cluck called after her, waving a hand at the wings he was piecing back together. A few were so stripped of feathers, he could only save the frames.

  Cluck couldn’t even use the family’s feathers, shed or plucked. He’d tried it once, weaving a few in among the peacock feathers. His mother found out before his grandfather realized what he was doing. “These are not spare parts to use for show,” she had said. The bruise Dax left him with took two weeks to fade. But if they strapped feathers to their bodies, Cluck wondered, why shouldn’t they be their own?

  His grandfather had told him, “We put ourselves on show enough for the gadje,” and Cluck understood. It was the same reason the blond Corbeaus coated their dark feathers in flour, to hide them. The show was all costumes and peacock feathers, lights hung in trees, tightrope walking. La magie of their bodies did not belong to the gadje, the people who were not like them.

  His grandfather came in and tossed a paper bag on the worktable. “I bought you something.” The bag fell over, its contents sliding out. A folded pair of brown corduroy pants, and a long-sleeved crewneck shirt the red of wet cranberries.

  Not this again. Since Cluck turned eighteen, his grandfather had been trying to get him into Levi’s. Last month, Pépère bought him a T-shirt the gray of a wet stone. In April, he’d left a jean jacket on Cluck’s bed.

  But Cluck liked wearing Pépère’s old clothes, and the feeling that they might make him like his grandfather. The things that made Alain Corbeau would soak into Cluck’s skin.

  This new shirt wouldn’t. The red was so close to the shade streaking Cluck’s feathers that he didn’t like looking at it. It made him blink first.

  “One day I will die and you will have to burn my things,” Pépère said. “Then what will you wear?”

  Pépère had told Cluck what his family back in le Midi did with the possessions of their dead. Nothing that belonged to the deceased was sold, especially not to anyone else Romani, who would never want to buy it anyway. Little was kept, only a few valuables given to family members. The rest was burned, especially clothes and sheets. Anything death had made mochadi, unclean.

  “I don’t think we do that anymore, Pépère,” Cluck said.

  “We did it where I come from, and one day you will do it for me. What will you do then, wear nothing?” His grandfather pushed the bag toward him. “If you don’t want to wear them, it’s your business. But you will keep them.”

  Stubborn. That was the other thing wearing Pépère’s clothes might make him.

  His grandfather coughed into his handkerchief.

  Cluck could hear the force tearing the back of his throat. “Pépère?”

  In the days since the mixing tank blew, his cough had gotten worse. The chemicals in the air irritated his smoke-worn lungs. He wouldn’t say so, but Cluck knew. The adhesive had settled, but the vapor still thickened the air. One more reason Cluck made sure his grandfather slept inside, not in the trailers that stayed hot
at night and chilled in the morning.

  “And those geniuses think they know how to run a chemical plant,” Cluck said.

  “It wouldn’t be the worst they’ve done,” his grandfather said between coughs.

  “What?” Cluck asked.

  “T’inquiète.” His grandfather folded the linen square. “It must be time for another cigarette, n’est-ce pas?”

  Pépère paused as he reached for the pack, his eyes following Cluck’s hands.

  Pépère took hold of Cluck’s forearms. He turned Cluck’s wrists, showing the burns on his palms. “What’s happened here?”

  Cluck kept his head down. The girl shooing him out of the room, calling him gitano, had stuck him with the feeling that taking her from the woods was some awful thing he’d done. He didn’t want Pépère knowing about any of it.

  “It’s from getting my shirt off,” Cluck said. He didn’t have to lift his head to know his grandfather’s stare was on him. He felt it like a draft through a window. “The reaction with the cotton.”

  Pépère gripped his forearm tighter. “I have never in your life given you reason to lie to me.”

  Cluck felt the words on his shoulders, sure as hands. His grandfather had taught him everything about feathers. Remiges for flight, retrices for balance. And it was thanks to Pépère that Cluck had learned to work with the fingers he had. Nine years ago, his left hand had been so broken, he couldn’t do anything with it. He learned to use his right, buttoned his shirts with it, forced out messy writing. It felt backward as putting a shoe on the wrong foot, but he did it. His fingers healed into a half-fist and grew restless, charged like the static on a metal knob. They wanted to work. But under Dax’s eye, and his mother’s, he couldn’t let them.

  When Pépère found him in the Airstream one night, his right fingers fighting with a needle and thread, he set a hand on his shoulder and said, “Use your left, boy.” Cluck had hesitated, sure it was a trick, but his grandfather took the needle from his right hand and slipped it between his left thumb and forefinger, the only two digits on his left hand that weren’t stuck curled under. “Notre secret,” Pépère had said, shutting the trailer door. Our secret.