The Weight of Feathers (8 page)

What happened to your shirt?
she tried to ask. The sound didn’t come. Her lips mouthed the words, but her throat didn’t help.

Had her cousins laid into him again?

The boy was talking at her, asking her things, beating her dress like it was alive.

She didn’t hear him. She watched a black feather drift from the back of his neck like a fallen piece of hair. The wind swirled it down to her arm, and it stuck. She jerked her elbow to shake it off, but it stayed. A single plume, the tip stiff with barbs, the lower half fluffy with down. Black, streaked red.

Pain spread through her cheek and neck. It burst open like a peony. The lights her father left for her flickered in their glass jars and went out.

El pez grande se come al chico.

The big fish eats the small one.

“Can you say your name?” the nurse asked. Lace knew the woman was a nurse without opening her eyes. She had all the nurse smells. Powdered latex gloves. Ballpoint pen ink. Unscented fabric softener.

The back of Lace’s scalp throbbed. She bit her tongue to keep from crying out.

“Do you remember why you’re here?” the nurse asked.

Lace’s lips scratched against each other. “The cotton candy,” she said. The cloud in the sky had looked so much like spun sugar. Waiting for a paper cone to whirl through. “Because of the cotton candy.”

She tried to curl onto her side, shifting her weight. The pain in her head rushed through her body. In the dark of her clenched-shut eyes, she saw it, the night twenty years ago. She may not have been there, but she’d heard the stories, all those trees sinking into the water. The lake swallowing the trunks whole.

No one in her family, not even the few of Lace’s uncles who saw it happen, knew how the Corbeaus had done it, except that however they did came from the strange power of their feathers. Their
magia negra.

“What if they’re doing it again?” Lace asked, the sound barely enough to make the words.

“Shh,” the nurse said, soft as a faucet running in another room.

Lace and her cousins had never been allowed to talk about that night. What the Corbeaus did was like death; the women in her grandmother’s village would not speak of it because they believed the word
muerte
burned the lips.

“They could be out there doing it again,” Lace got out, but all she got back was more
shh
.

Lace had not been born twenty years ago to see what the Corbeaus had done. But she had heard the story. First when she was four, the day she picked up a crow feather off the ground, all the barbs perfect and pure black. When she came inside twirling it in her hand, her mother had grabbed it from her small fingers so hard Lace braced for her mother to slap her. Instead, her mother told her about the awful thing Lace had not yet been alive to see.

The Corbeaus had meant the accident twenty years ago to ruin the Palomas’ stretch of river, spoiling their stage and killing as many of them as they could. All at once the slow, steady current had grown turbulent, like there was a storm under the surface. Loose branches stabbed through the water. Sudden rapids tumbled in from the lake. The Corbeaus had wanted the
sirenas
trapped in the river’s root tangles like figurines in snow globes.

The mermaids had all escaped those waters, rough as a wild sea. And the Corbeaus’ own
magia negra
had turned on them. They did not love the water, so they could not control it. The lake rushed up onto its beaches, and the grove of shoreline trees where the Corbeaus held their own shows went into the water, pulled in quick as if the current had grabbed them by the roots.

Tía
Lora’s husband was swept into the lake with those trees and drowned.

Lace opened her eyes, the lids heavy and swollen. The light made her forehead pulse, like having her hair pulled.

The nurse’s lilac eye shadow matched her scrubs. She wrote on her clipboard, the cap of her pen chewed like a licorice stick.

One corner of a ceiling panel lifted away from its frame, just enough to let in a black feather. Lace watched it dip and rise. It spun down and landed on the back of her hand. She brushed it away. It slipped off the sheet and through the guardrail.

But another fell.

“See?” she asked the nurse, but the nurse didn’t see.

Lace shook it off, but two more fell, then six more, then a dozen, until there was no more ceiling. Only a sky made of black feathers, brushed with the red of candy apples. Red glaze made of the same sugar as that cotton candy sky.

She screamed. Her screaming made another nurse appear, this one all blue. She came with a needle and a vial and a bag of water. Lace looked for the goldfish in the bag of water, but they’d forgotten the goldfish.

Lace said so. She told them they needed to bring back the bag of water and the candy apples and the cotton candy. Give it all back for a bag of water with a goldfish.

“Did you hear me?” Lace asked. “They forgot the fish. They didn’t give you the fish.”

But there was still no goldfish, and the feathers kept falling.

Drowsiness settled over her. Her weight fell against the bed. Her eyes shut without her shutting them, like a doll tipped backward.

Her pulse ticked under her skin, like a watch under tissue paper.

She was the fish, raw and sliced. The bag of water was for her.

Qui trop embrasse mal étreint.

Grasp all, lose all.

A nurse stopped in the doorway, hand on the frame. “You been here all night?”

“No,” Cluck said. Another nurse had sent him home around one in the morning, promising, “We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.” So he’d gone back to the trailer and changed his clothes. It took him fifteen minutes to get his pants off. Thanks to the adhesive, the linen took half the hair on his legs.

He’d come back with a milk bottle full of Indian paintbrush, bachelor buttons, a burst of wild roses. It had taken the better part of an hour to find flowers the adhesive hadn’t ruined, ones low enough to the ground that taller stalks had shielded them. On the walk back to the hospital, Cluck had almost stepped on a tourist’s Polaroid, left on the side of the road. The hot adhesive had burned through the film. Except for a corner of sky, the image never developed.

The nurse stepped into the room. “Visiting hours aren’t until eight, you know.”

“I can hide in the supply closet until then if you want,” he said.

She chuckled and joined him at the window. Cluck parted the blinds. It bothered him how much Almendro looked the same as it had yesterday. If he didn’t look too close, he couldn’t see the adhesive glossing the roof shingles like rubber cement, or the stray cats and dogs, their fur matted with it, or how it frosted cars and mailboxes like drying Elmer’s glue.

The difference was how the air felt, hot with the faint sense that the smallest noise would make everyone in this town flinch at once. The things that had changed were harder to see than the wilted plants and the tacky sidewalks. The ruptured mixing tank had left three plant workers dead, and a dozen others injured. Every family who relied on paychecks from the plant held their breath still in their lungs. And everyone else kept quiet, stunned by the noise and the rain, afraid to go outside.

None of it had to happen. None of it would have happened if the Palomas hadn’t ruined
Pépère,
cost him his job. Cluck’s grandfather was the only man pushing for the plant to run safer, and when they let him go, they dropped his safety procedures one by one in the name of efficiency. When the Palomas wrecked
Pépère
’s good name, they destroyed the credibility of all the work he’d done.

“Did you lose anybody?” Cluck asked the nurse.

She checked an IV line. “Nobody close.”

Cluck had heard the nurses talking about some workers’ wives, friends, a few others picketing at the fence, wanting answers. He didn’t have to ask why the plant workers weren’t there too. He could almost hear Almendro pulling at its own seams. Half the town would demand justice, an admission from the plant’s owners, and the other half would beg them to shut up. If the plant pulled out, there were no jobs. So the workers swallowed the last-minute shifts, the blowdown stacks that made the air sting their eyes, the non-regulation safety gear.

The nurse put her hair back with a rubber band that matched her scrubs. Her nails, that same light purple, clicked against her pen. He couldn’t imagine liking one color that much. Not even the red in his feathers. Especially not the red in his feathers.

“Try not to get me in trouble,” the nurse said, checking her watch on the way out.

The girl in the hospital bed ground her teeth in her sleep. The solvents they’d used to get the adhesive off her skin left her rawer.

Where she’d held her cheek against the sleeve of her dress, she now had a deep red burn in a blurred heart shape.

She’d probably never know that all of this was the Paloma family’s fault. She’d never know that it started twenty years ago, the night the lake had flooded onto its shores like a creek bed overflowing, and those trees sank straight down like hands had pulled them under. His mother said they disappeared under a surface so calm it must have been
la magie noire,
the same dark magic that gave the Palomas their scales.

The Palomas started some rumor that Cluck’s grandfather caused it, that it was some failed experiment, as if his engineering degree had taught him how to make a lake swallow trees. Cluck couldn’t prove they’d started it, but he knew. The rumors had tainted the rest of Almendro like fire blight, and
Pépère
had lost his job. Now he had to travel with the family, Cluck’s mother and aunts not caring that he might not want to come back to this town.

One day Cluck would go to school the way his grandfather had. He’d keep things like what happened to this girl from happening to anyone else.

Maybe his family would cut their run here short because of the accident. Maybe they’d move on, give this town space to stitch itself back together. They could move up their stop in Tuolumne County. They always got plenty of tourists there, and some of the best climbing trees Cluck had ever seen. Sturdy, well-spaced boughs. Full greenery that let the light through like tissue paper. In those branches, his cousins looked like oleander blossoms in a sea of leaves.

The girl stirred, making noises that could’ve been pain or waking up. He saw the shape of her moving in the windowpane.

“
Tío
Lisandro?” she asked. “Aren’t you dead?”

Any other morning, he might have laughed. Thanks to his grandfather’s clothes, he probably looked like an old black-and-white photograph in one of her family’s albums. A ghost come to life, complete with suspenders.

“Nope.” He turned around, hands in his pockets. He didn’t want her seeing his fingers. Pulling off his shirt and her dress had left them blistered and burned. Every time the nurse spotted him, she made him cover them in something greasy that smelled like a citronella candle. “Not dead. Not Lisandro either.”

But the girl wasn’t looking at him. She patted the bed around her.

He wondered when she’d notice her hair. Last night it fell to her lower back. Today it stopped just below her collarbone. The rest had been so tangled, so full of brush bits and cyanoacrylate, they’d had to cut it off.

He rubbed at the back of his neck. The falling adhesive had turned his skin raw, and now the starched collar of his grandfather’s old shirt made it worse.

She pulled at the loose fabric around her waist. “Where are my clothes?”

The strips of fabric that had once been her dress were long gone in a hospital waste bin. Her bra hadn’t made it either. It had some kind of plastic beading on it that melted like sugar.

“Hospital gown,” he said. “It’s cute. Got ducks on it.”

Her fingers found her IV. She pulled it from the inside of her elbow. The long needle flopped out, limp and bloody, and she climbed over the guardrail.

“Hey. You’re supposed to hit the button, not pull the thing out. Hit the button.” He put his hand on the rail.

She saw it before he could pull it back. He couldn’t tell if her stare was because of the blisters, or because of his third, fourth, and fifth fingers, always curled under.

He tried giving her the call button, but she was staring down at the hospital sheet. One of his feathers had fallen onto the bed, a brushstroke of red and black. Scratching at the back of his neck must have knocked it loose.

She looked up at him, eyes red from solvents and morphine, and registered that he wasn’t an orderly or a dead relative. She smelled like blood and acetone.

“What did you do to me,
gitano
?” she asked.

He dropped the call button. It hit the sheet and bounced.

Gitano
. The Spanish was close enough to the French.
Gitan
. Gypsy.

She thought he’d done this to her, that the feather on the sheet meant he’d put a
gitan
curse on her. Her burns, her cut hair. She thought it was all him. He could tell from how she’d said the word.

This was why his family never let people see their feathers. If they hid them, they were just show performers. But if anyone saw them, they’d think what this girl thought, that they were full of dark magic.

She grabbed the water pitcher from the bedside table, holding it up like it wasn’t cheap plastic, but ceramic. Something she could break over his head. The spout splashed her hand and her hospital gown.

“Get out,” she said.

Cluck held up his hands, not caring what she thought of them, and backed out of the room.

Eugenie leaned against the hallway wall, painted the same dull salmon color as the water pitchers and emesis bins. She stood out, a brighter pink. She’d taken the cyanoacrylate worse than he had. Cluck was out in it longer, but Eugenie was paler. She’d been wandering each floor of the hospital, still in her ruined silk dress, looking like she’d taken too hot a bath. The frog who didn’t feel the water boiling.