The Weight of Feathers (23 page)

They’d all melt, like painted faces on wet canvas. This was no plain summer storm. It had teeth, and breath hot as a gas flame.

Pain flared through Lace’s body, like sandpaper rubbing the new skin on her burns.

She forced the sound stuck in her throat. It came out not in words, but in screaming. She screamed into the sky, looking for that spreading cloud. She wrenched herself out of the woman’s hold, but the man set his hands on her shoulders to lead her forward. She listened for the plant sirens under her own screaming, but there were only those two voices, telling her to calm down, there was no reason to get so upset.

The rain picked at her skin, peeling it back like old wallpaper. Sobbing punctured her screaming. They would all die here, because no one had turned the sirens on this time.

Her screaming pulled a crowd from the grocery store. They would die too, because of her, because she couldn’t turn the sound to words.

Palms spread across her back. Not the woman’s or her husband’s, but hands Lace knew. They carried the violet and ash scent of black salt. The wax and powder down of feathers. They came with a voice that told the man and the woman, “It’s okay, I know her, she’s with me.”

He held her against him, one hand in her hair, the other gripping her waist, and she couldn’t feel the rain anymore. She screamed into his shirt, sending the rage of unmade words into him. It vibrated through him to her hands on his back. The rain on her dress and his shirt would stick them to each other, dissolve the skin between them, until their veins tangled like roots, and they breathed together, one scaled and dark-feathered thing.

Les fruits défendus sont les plus doux.

Forbidden fruit is the sweetest.

He’d gotten her back to the trailer. More because she wanted to get away from the bus stop than because she wanted to go with him, but he’d take it.

He set water on the stove. He couldn’t stay mad at her. If she’d seemed mad at him, he could’ve kept it going. But she just sat on the built-in bed, wearing one of his shirts, crying into the sleeves that hung past her hands.

She stopped for a minute, saw the makeup stains her eyes had left on the cuffs, and started crying again.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll come out.”

Then she just held the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing her front into her knees. “Everyone in this town thinks I’m crazy now, don’t they?”

By morning the whole town would probably hear about the girl who snapped while waiting for a bus.

“You want me to lie to you?” he asked.

“So that’s a yes.”

“If they know you’re from a show family, then believe me, they thought you were crazy already.” He poured hot water over lavender buds, thyme leaves, lemon peel, the way his grandfather told him
Mémère
used to for her sisters when they couldn’t sleep, and then for
Pépère
and their children.

The lavender and lemon cut the scent of rain. It had stopped, but the metallic smell of clouds hung on.

“They really kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cluck sat next to her on the built-in and set the cup in her hands. “Your family?“

She took it. “It’s not that simple.”

He rolled up one of the shirtsleeves, one slow cuffing-up at a time, in case she stopped him. She didn’t.

He folded the cuff up to show the semiplume imprint. “You thought I gave you this?”

“It’s your feather,” she said.

The truth pinched at him. It did look like one of his feathers, its shadow caught and made still.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t put it there. I promise. It’s a burn. It’ll heal, and it’ll either scar or it won’t.”

It wasn’t Cluck’s choice whether it stayed, but he wanted it to. He wanted that mark on her, the copy of one of his feathers. The shame of it pushed up against his anger about Dax signing off that net.

“How’d you get out of that thing?” Cluck asked. “The night the mixing tank blew.”

“How do you think?” she asked. “I ripped my costume.”

He remembered putting the fabric and beading into the river, watching the water take it. “That was your tail Dax had, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

That was why she’d kissed him, because he’d taken something that had once been part of her out of his brother’s hands.

“Don’t you hate me?” she asked.

“For not telling me? I can’t blame you, seeing as how I took it so well.”

“No, because you hate my family.”

“I don’t hate your family,” he said. “I hate what they did.”

“How do you know they did it?”

“I wasn’t there, so I don’t. But my best guess is that they did.”

“Your best guess is wrong,” she said.

He wasn’t doing this again. Whatever happened twenty years ago, neither of them had been around to be part of it. Lace hadn’t even been born when the Palomas got his grandfather laid off. It wasn’t on her. Cluck was keeping the rest of their families outside the trailer door. There wasn’t enough room for everybody.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“You tell me. If you knew for sure you were right, would you still want me here?”

“If you knew for sure you were, would you want to be here?”

She brushed her thumb over the cut on his lip. The pad was hot from the cup.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“You should see the other guy.”

“It wasn’t my cousins, was it?”

“No.”

“Who was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. There aren’t usually introductions.” He got up from the built-in. “Drink that, okay?”

“Are you drugging me so you can go through my suitcase?” she asked. “I’ll save you some trouble. Yes, my costume’s in there. Not that I’ll need it anytime soon.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She rubbed her thumb over a cuff button. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I’m not,” he said. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have wanted to know her. He’d never have known what it felt like to hold a girl with a fear of falling, to help her steady her weight on those high branches. He never would have met that woman who made him so sure what
Mémère
would have been like.

He listened for the back door of the house opening or closing. He shouldn’t have had Lace in the blue and white trailer with him. But he was so far past “shouldn’t.” He’d held a Paloma girl close enough to feel the heat of her mouth through his shirt. He’d let a Paloma woman fix the splintered bone in his ring finger. If the Palomas’
magie noire
was poison, he had more than enough in him to kill him. And if it didn’t, it meant there was so much in him it was turning him, his body folding it into its cells until he was immune.

Cluck wouldn’t tell anyone about the Paloma who’d fixed his ring finger. They’d just call her
une sorcière
. He didn’t even know how to tell Lace without sounding like he was calling the woman a witch.

“You want to come back to the show?” he asked her.

Lace watched the lavender spin in the cup.

“You’re good at your job,” he said. “No one wants to lose you.”

She flicked the side of the cup with her forefinger, and the buds spun the other way.

“No one has to know,” he said.

“Half your family must have heard us.” She set the teacup down. “I think they already do.”

“They didn’t hear what we were saying. My brother. He just thinks we’re, uh … You know.”

She laughed and curled on her side, looking up at the trailer’s water-stained ceiling.
Mémère
’s dreamless cure was working.

“Why’d you come after me?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I went out for milk.”

She shut her eyes. “What happened to your hand?”

Even half-asleep, she kept trying.

“Car door,” he said.

“Which one?”

“Which car?” he asked. “It was this old Ford. It barely ran. We don’t have it anymore.”

“Which hand, Cluck?”

A hollow place inside him grew hot and tight, like the neutron stars in
Pépère
’s books. He checked his right ring finger. It bent and straightened. He flinched, wondering if
Mémère
’s tea let Lace see things, places now healed but once broken.

Lace let her cheek fall against the mattress. “It’s not fair. You know everything about me now.”

“No, I don’t.”

“There’s stuff I want to know about you, and there’s nothing left you want to know about me.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “There’s plenty I want to know.”

“Like what?”

“How you look in that tail.”

She smiled, not making it all the way to a laugh, and slept.

The muscles in his right hand hummed, full of electricity as dry clouds. The bone knitting in his ring finger was new and restless. It wanted to act, to make something. So he collected the years of white peacock feathers off the floor, and took his wires and tools to the Airstream.

Thanks to Lace, a little of
la magie noire
ran through his blood. A trace of what made her a Paloma had gotten into him.

He liked it, that sense of something new and sharp and alive. If he forgot for a second that Lace and that woman who made him think of
Mémère
were Palomas, it made him feel safe and awake. Like when everyone was gone in the afternoon, and Cluck slept for that one quiet hour before call time, knowing Dax and his mother were far from the blue and white trailer. He’d wake up and splash cold water on his face, ready for all the evening’s noise and little lights.

But just because he liked what Lace had done to him didn’t mean he’d let it go one way.

It was time he returned the favor.

Qui craint le danger ne doit pas aller en mer.

He who fears danger should not go to sea.

He didn’t remember finishing, or falling asleep.

The sun came through the Airstream’s curtains, needling his eyes. It lit up the worktable, and the hundreds of leucistic feathers wired into wings. They had the same frame as the other wings, bent metal standing in for humerus, ulna, radius. Carpals and metacarpals. The leucistic peacock’s back coverts, molted each season, shaped the grain of the feathers.

The sun showed the faint washes on the eyespots. The sheer yellow of a lemon slice’s inner curve. A blush of pink and violet. The blue and green of certain chickens’ eggs.

He sat up and rubbed the back of his neck, stiff from falling asleep at the table. He hadn’t been able to use the wire frame he’d salvaged after the accident. Those were for men’s wings, too tall and broad for Lace’s body.

He checked the blue and white trailer. “Lace?”

She wasn’t there. She’d smoothed the sheet on the built-in, folded the blanket. Her suitcase was flopped closed but not locked.

A point of light winked from the floor. He picked it up, held it to the window. A plastic sequin, pink and translucent as a grapefruit segment.

He took off toward the woods. If that sequin had fallen off what he thought it had fallen off of, he had to find her before Dax did.

He ran toward the river, listening for the sound of her splashing over the soft rush of the current.

Through the reeds, he spotted the pink of her costume and the wet black of her hair. She turned in the water, the sun glinting off her body. It made the drops on her shoulders and arms glow. It glimmered through the beads and sequins on her costume. Her fin flicked the river, a petal off a tulip tree.

Her skin was healing. Though still dark as new blackberries, the heart on her cheek had grown small as an apricot. The burns on her back had lightened and started to scar over.

She dove down, staying under so long he thought of the colanders catching her tail.

“Lace?” He took off his shirt to go in after her.

She surfaced, blinking the sediment from her eyes. How did she tread with that tail on? Wet, with all the beading, it must’ve weighed ten pounds.

His family would tell him countless men had lost their lives this way. In stories, soldiers and travelers neared ponds and rivers, drawn by
les feux follets,
those luring lights, and the laughter and singing of water spirits. Some were like
Melusine,
the river spirit whose legs became fins every Saturday. If a mortal man caught her in her true form, she would turn to a serpent and kill him.

These were his family’s bedtime stories, those evil women with scales on their bodies and fins for feet. Where other children were told not to play with fire, Cluck and his brother and cousins were warned off water. When Cluck was thirteen or fourteen, his grandfather cautioned him against the
nivasia,
mermaids who became pregnant by mortal men and then murdered them.

All those stories ended the same. She was beautiful. A man loved her. She killed him.

Lace saw him, but didn’t startle.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“You said you wanted to see it.” She flicked her tail, and water sprayed his forearms. “I thought if I showed you, you’d tell me what happened to your hand.”

“I never agreed to that.”

The shape of her bare breasts showed, lighter brown than the rest of her. They floated like fallen oranges. He couldn’t tell whether the accident had scarred them. The refraction through the water kept him from seeing.

The blue-black of the river made them look pale. They glowed like twin moons, turned gold from staying near the horizon.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck. “You’re not wearing a top.”

“What were you expecting? A couple of clam shells and a piece of string?”

“Don’t give me that.” He’d seen the show. The Paloma women wore costume pieces that looked like bras covered in sequins. “If you all performed topless, the chamber of commerce would have you arrested before your hair dried, and you know it. You’ve got to wear something.”

“We do,” she said. “And mine got ruined the night you found me.”

She must have forgotten how much length her hair had lost that night. When she lifted her shoulders out of the water, the ends stuck to her breasts, but didn’t cover them. He looked at them so hard he could almost feel their weight in his palms. He wondered if the water would leave them cool, or if they’d give off the warmth that lived under her skin. He thought of touching her until there was none of the river’s cold left on her, just the heat of his hands.