The Weight of Feathers

“If you don’t tell them how I got it, I’ll do what you want, I’ll go,” Lace said. Not a question. An equation, sure and immutable as the ones on her father’s worksheets.

Abuela turned her head, half-shutting her eyes. She knew what Lace meant. Listen to me, or I will make this messy. I will be a pain in your ass.

“My dad will go against you on this,” Lace said. “You know that. If you promise you won’t tell them, I’ll convince him. He’ll let me go.”

Abuela kept her laugh behind her lips. “You can take him with you. He has the name for it.”

Lace flinched. Abuela had never forgiven Lace’s father for being born with the last name Cuervo, even after he let it go, changed it, endured the taunting of other men for taking his wife’s name.

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.