The Weight of Feathers (17 page)

The idea fluttered along her rib cage that if she touched him again, she would turn to dust or fire. She lifted her hand to his face, wanting to know if it was true.

But the whispers from the other side of town stilled her. The wind carried the call of reed pipes. River kelp wrapped around her, pulling her down. It would take her under until water filled her, and she did not breathe. Those voices whispered their assurances.
Better you drown than touch him.

So she didn’t touch his cheek like she meant to. Didn’t follow the shape of his temple down to his jawline. She took a lock of his hair between her fingers. It felt slick as the barbs of a feather, smooth, ready for rain. He shut his eyes as though he felt it, like the blue-black of his hair was living, as full of blood and nerves as his skin.

His look toward her mouth was quick, like she might not notice if he was fast enough. Then he lifted his eyes back up to hers. Even in daylight, his irises made her think of wet earth.

“Sorry about your postcards,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “If it’s windy enough, maybe they’ll get where they’re going.”

She tilted her head enough to tell him she wanted it, but didn’t move so much that those voices could say she started it. He was close enough that she could have traced his lower lip with her tongue.

The sound of laughing came from the back of the house, and he broke away. He raised his head, looking past Lace out the truck window. He mumbled something that may or may not have been French, and got out on the driver’s side.

Lace glanced around the truck. The laughing wasn’t close enough to be at them. She jumped down from the cab and went after him.

Dax and a couple of the other Corbeau men clustered behind a trailer. Cluck joined them, his back to Lace. Even through his shirt, she could make out the tension in his shoulders.

Cluck shifted his weight, and Lace saw the thing in Dax’s hands. She stopped, and her feet skidded against the ground.

She knew those scraps of beaded fabric as well as her own body. The small stitches. The bursts of glass beads. Her old tail, the grapefruit pink now dulled to peach. The current must have pulled it loose from that ball of roots. The silt and river water had left it dirty, drying stiff.

Something deep red had splattered it. The color, close to new blood, pressed into Lace’s collarbone. Then she saw the jar of blackberry jam, dark as wine, in a cousin’s hands.

Dax holding her old tail made her feel his hands on her lower back, her hips, her thighs. Everywhere Cluck had touched cooled, leaving room for the pinch of Dax’s grip.

“What the hell are you doing?” Cluck asked.

“What does it look like?” Dax asked. “We’re gonna make a delivery.”

“Where did you get this?” Cluck grabbed the fin, balling it in his hands. The sense of his fingers on Lace’s ankle, while Dax still held the rest of her, almost made her kneel.

“It washed up,” said one of the cousins, flicking more of the blackberry jam over the fabric. “One of the fish must’ve lost it.” Red stained his fingers, and Dax’s. It stained all their hands.

Lace had made her peace with losing that tail to the river. The water would swallow it and keep it. Like a communion
hostia,
it would dissolve on the current’s tongue.

But now the Corbeaus had it.

If she saved it from their hands, they’d know, and she’d have to run. The feather burn would stay on her forever, this family’s hate searing it deeper into her skin.

If she did nothing, they would stain it, leave it outside the motel for
Abuela
or Martha or worse, her great-aunt, whose skilled, tired hands had worked so many nights to make it.
Tía
Lora would take it as a sign that Lace had died or would soon.

The one with the jar held it out to Cluck, offering him a turn.

Cluck stood close to his brother. “Stop.”

Dax laughed and splashed a little more blackberry jam on the tail. Lace felt it, sharp as cuts.

Cluck ripped the tail out of Dax’s hands. Flecks of red sprayed both their shirts.

The cousins froze. One stepped back.

Lace folded her tongue and bit down. The relief of her tail going from Dax’s hands to Cluck’s was so sharp it was almost pain.

“You really want to go over there and make this worse?” Cluck asked, his voice low enough that Lace could barely hear it, the words meant just for his brother. He shrugged his shoulder toward their cousins. “You want to see one of them die this year?”

A few Corbeau women came outside. Clémentine. Eugenie. A couple others Lace had done makeup on. One screamed at the sight of all the red, but one of the cousins rushed to show her the blackberry jam jar.

Dax thumbed a spot off his chin and stared his brother down. “You hate them as much as I do.”

“More.” Cluck tightened his grip on the fabric. “But we are not doing this.”

Dax glanced over his shoulder, sensing the women watching.

He looked back at Cluck. “You just used your one free pass.” He took a handful of the tail and shoved it at Cluck’s chest, staining his shirt worse.

Cluck balled the tail up in his hands and took it into the costume trailer.

Lace followed him.

He folded the tail like an antique dress or a lace tablecloth. “Sorry you had to see that.”

She shut the trailer door.

“We’re not crazy, just so you know,” he said, but didn’t look at her. “There are reasons we feel how we feel.”

Right then, she didn’t care what he thought of her family, what he would think of her if he knew her full name. She cared that her old tail wasn’t in Dax’s hands, on its way to
Tía
Lora.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He set it down on the counter. “If I throw it out here, Dax’ll find it. I could throw it out in town.” He ran his fingers over the beading, and Lace shivered. “But it just doesn’t seem right.”

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked a little sad, a half-frown creasing the corner of his mouth. “It’s just good work, that’s all.”

The sting of Dax’s hands faded, and the feeling of Cluck’s came back. Cluck may have hated the name Paloma, but he recognized the art in those stitches and beads. To him, seeing them stained and torn must have been a little like finding a pair of peacock-feather wings ripped apart.

Her last name may not have been safe on his tongue, but this fabric and these beads, this part of her the water had sealed to her body like skin, was safe in his hands.

“If I bring it to the other family, it’s gonna look like a threat,” he said.

“Then let me do it,” Lace said. “They don’t know who I am.” She could get it to Martha, who’d hide it in with the dresses
Abuela
didn’t like her wearing.

“No,” Cluck said. “I don’t want you anywhere near that family.”

That family
. Her mouth grew hot with wanting to tell him whatever he thought he knew, whatever he thought about her family, he had heard wrong, been told wrong.

He was the one good one out of all these crows.

“I have an idea,” she said.

She brought him to the river, the ruined tail in her arms. This way it would be out of the Corbeaus’ hands, and her great-aunt would never see the stains.

She gathered handfuls of small stones, worn smooth by the current, and stuffed them through a hole in a fin seam. When enough stones weighted down the bottom edge of the fin, she gave it back to the water.

The dull pink sank and vanished. Quiet fell over her, the slow joy of finding the sun on a cold day. Those stones would hold her ruined tail at the river bottom.

The relief was so perfect it made her
escamas
sore. It bubbled up through her, spilling out of her, making her kiss Cluck’s cheek.

He ignored it, took it as the same kind of teasing as her shoving his arm. So she kissed him on the mouth to make him understand, lightly, just enough to feel the fine grain of his lips, a little chapped by dust and wind. He accepted it, not pulling away. But he didn’t deepen it. He didn’t take her tongue or give her his. He took it like she meant it. More than a greeting, less than it would have been in the cab of his grandfather’s truck.

When she pulled away, he did too.

He opened his eyes. “What was that for?”

“For what you did,” she said.

He squinted enough that his eyelashes almost met. “What do you care? This isn’t your fight.”

“It
is
my fight.” She said it without thinking. But it slipped into lies she’d already told, easily as her old tail sinking into the river. “This town’s too small for a war,” she said, like this town, not the war, belonged to her.

He watched the corner of the fin flick up and then go under. Then he started back toward the house.

A few steps away, he realized she wasn’t behind him, and looked over his shoulder. “You coming?”

She searched the river for a flush of peach, but the water had folded it into the dark.

They walked back to the old Craftsman. She went in with him, and the breath of the Paloma women followed. Those
voces
tried to tell her that him holding the door wasn’t a polite thing. He could turn himself into a crow with knives for feathers, and she wouldn’t see in time to run.

Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.

Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

Cluck held his hands under the kitchen tap, washing the blackberry off his fingers.

He watched Lace pat her hands dry on a dish towel.

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

The water jumped from warm to hot, prickling his fingers. “You getting ideas?”

She shoved him. “It’s stained. I can get those out.”

Cluck unbuttoned the cuffs. “I know how to wash a shirt.”

“Do you know how to get Almendro blackberry out? Because I do.” She cut open a lemon from the fruit bowl and found a half-flat bottle of soda water in the fridge. “My younger cousins always got this stuff on their good clothes.”

He unbuttoned the front, and slipped out of it.

She rubbed the lemon and soda water into the stains and ran them under the kitchen tap. The flecks faded and disappeared.

“Hey, that actually works,” Cluck said. “I thought I was gonna have to figure out what to wear with a pink shirt.”

“Why not just wear stuff you can throw in a washer?” she asked.

“My clothes used to be my grandfather’s,” he said. “I like wearing what he wore.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess it makes me feel like I could be like him.” He thought of the Alain Corbeau-ness flooding into him.

She scrubbed at a stain. Even watching her profile, he could see a little bit of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You doing okay here so far?” he asked.

“Yeah. They trust me to make them look good, believe it or not.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked.

She turned her head, and that smile turned sad and patient, bearing with the question.

She meant the burn on her cheek. Even his mother, piling loose powder on her like layers of
une millefeuille,
couldn’t make her forget it. That burn kept her from seeing how her hair was the deep brown of black mustard seeds, or that her eyelashes looked like the smallest feathers.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

Her lips parted a little. She looked as likely to tell him to go screw himself as she did to say thank you.

“You don’t have to say that,” she said.

He needed to shut up. The older Corbeaus always taught the younger ones how to talk to girls, but nobody had taught him. At eighteen, he was too old to be outright forbidden from talking to girls, but he was still
le petit démon
. His uncles’ glares whenever they saw him so much as ask a local girl for directions was enough to put him off trying altogether.

But he couldn’t let Lace think he was talking about some version of her from before the accident. She had the same face. It just had a bloom of red on it.

“I know I don’t have to say it,” he said. He stopped himself from saying the word “beautiful” again. “It’s just true.”

She stared at him. Her hands stayed still, holding his shirt. The wet fabric dripped into the metal sink.

He shouldn’t have said it at all. Saying it with his shirt off just made it worse. Why not unbutton his fly while he was at it?

He grabbed for something to change the subject to, but everything he landed on made it worse. The pattern on her dress. How the ends of her hair had gotten in the way, and were wet from the tap. Her hands working the fabric of his shirt in a way that made him wish he was still in it.

She wrung out his shirt and handed it to him. “Just hang it up. It should be good.” She put the club soda and the other half of the lemon in the fridge. The citrus smell made the air feel thin and clean.

He had to leave. Standing there with the wet shirt in his hands would make him look even more
comme un con
than he already felt.

You’re beautiful. It’s just true.
His own words hovered in the air like dragonflies. Even when he went out the back door to hang up his shirt, he could hear the humming of their wings. He had no way of knowing if she wanted to swat them away or open her hands to let them land.

Pájaro viejo no entra en jaula.

An old bird is difficult to catch.

“Lace.”

Lace woke first to Clémentine’s voice, then to the pain in her arms.

“Lace.”

Clémentine held her hands, stopping her from clawing her own skin.

Lace sat up. She remembered the dream of that cotton-candy sky, how it fell, scalding everything.

“You’ve scratched yourself open,” Clémentine said.

A few dots of blood speckled Lace’s sleeves. Clémentine tried to roll them up, but Lace pulled her hands away.

“You should clean those.” Clémentine handed Lace the things she needed to shower.

Hot water still hurt. It drummed heat into Lace’s back, scratched at her cheek. It came on like the sting of touching dry ice. It made her brace her hands on the wall tile.