Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

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 dresser. “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.