The Weight of Feathers

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.