The Weight of Feathers

The Bible was in English. She wondered if it belonged to him, or Nicole, or whoever rented them this house.

She turned to the right chapter and verse. She only knew one word, frère, but it was enough to tell her the right part of the verse. Am I my brother’s keeper? The line in scripture that had let men pass the buck for thousands of years.

She shut the Bible and threw it on the desk. “Did you know? This whole time, did you know?”

“Know what?” He put the Bible back on the shelf.

She set her hands on the edge of the desk. “Where were you in all this?”

He kept working.

She grabbed the pen from his fingers.

His hand shot out toward hers, gripping it. “Let it go.”

She tried pulling her hand back. Trying to twist free made his hold worse.

His thumb pressed back on her index and third fingers. “Let go.”

She doubled over the desk. Her fingers would not give up the pen. A spot of ink bled onto Dax’s palm.

“Stop,” she choked out.

She tried to let the pen go, but now he was smashing her hand into it. The pressure built in her joints. If he kept bending her fingers back, the bones would give and crack.

“Let it go,” he said, low as a whisper. The alcohol of his cologne stung the back of her throat.

Her hand trembled, her mouth trying to make the word Please. If he kept holding her this hard, twisting her knuckles, he would break both her fingers in one snap, like Cluck’s hand, ruined by a single thing he would never tell her. Jousting or bullfighting. Lies more ridiculous than his fake names.

All those stories about car doors and falling out of trees.

Genesis, fourth chapter.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Cain’s answer when God asked where Abel was.

Dax had wrecked the hand Cluck thought he should never use.

The numbers floated through her brain like math on her father’s worksheets. Cluck was eighteen. It had happened nine years ago, when he was nine years old. Dax couldn’t have been older than fourteen. How had his fingers held that kind of brutal will?

This was the sin of mothers and fathers, thinking their children were too young, too much children, to be cruel. Oscar and Rey weren’t any older when they joined their uncles shooting crows.

Lace’s stomach clenched and then gave. The borraja tea came up. The acid burned her throat, and she coughed it out. It sprayed Dax’s suit. He jumped back and let her hand go.

She dropped the pen and ran out of the room, hunching her shoulder to wipe her mouth on her sleeve.

Nicole Corbeau stepped into the hall. She held out a hand to stop Lace. “Tu couve quelque chose?”

The water in Lace’s eyes beaded and fell. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. “How could you lie to him like this?”

The blue of Nicole Corbeau’s eyes lightened, like water draining from a bathtub. She knew what Lace meant. Who him was. What this was.

“How could you let him believe all this?” Lace asked. Her voice would have broken into screaming if she’d had the air. She heard the full, heavy call of arundo reeds creep into the words, their breath holding up her weak voice. She didn’t care. Let Nicole Corbeau hear it. Let her know Lace was a sirena who would not keep Corbeau lies locked under her tongue.

Nicole Corbeau pressed on Lace’s back to get her into a side room.

She shut the door. “I didn’t decide it. My sisters did.”

“But you went along with it,” Lace said.

“Dax’s father left. He wouldn’t marry me. You don’t know what that means in this family.” She folded her thin arms over the black linen of her dress. “They decided this was my penance for having the son I wanted. Being forced to raise another who wasn’t mine.”

Two bastardos who would think they shared a vanished father.

“Dax doesn’t know?” Lace asked.

Nicole’s laugh was small but sharp. “He thinks he remembers when I was pregnant. He was five. You can convince a child that age of anything.”