The Weight of Feathers

“I just like being up there. It’s quiet.”


No one in her family liked heights. They’d never understood why anyone put themselves somewhere they could fall from. But now she wondered if being up high was a little bit like swimming, when the shelf of a lakeshore dropped out to the water’s full depth. The light thinned out before it reached the bottom. The distance to the lake bed felt endless as the night sky.

The difference was gravity. There was no falling to the lake bed. If she stopped swimming, she drifted toward the light.

“Looks dangerous,” she said.

“You can’t avoid everything dangerous.”

“I try.”

“Oh yeah? How’s that going?”

She slapped his upper arm, pulling her hand back as soon as she touched him. The last time she’d done that, he’d said it meant she was a Corbeau. She felt the words like a stain.

He grabbed her hand before she let it fall to her side. “Thank you,” he said. “For telling me. If you didn’t, nobody would.”

She held onto his. She never got to see his wrecked hand this well. It was always doing something with wires and feathers.

She guided his thumb against her palm. “Does that hurt?” She touched his curved-under fingers.

When he slow-blinked, his eyelashes looked blue-black, like the river at night.

“No,” he said.

Their hands weren’t crossing the space between them, her right to his right. His left hand held her right hand. Nothing between their bodies.

He’d reached out for her with his left hand. Without thinking, he used his left hand.

“Are you left-handed?” she asked.

He pulled his hand away. “No.”

“But you just…”

“I work with both. It makes you ambidextrous.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Lace had been sewing since she could hold a needle, and that had never happened, not even when she broke her right wrist jumping into a shallow pond.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked.

“I told you. Bull fighting.”

The more she asked the same questions, the more he lied. It made her own lies smaller, easier to stuff into her suitcase with her tail, pink as agua de sandía.

“So what’s special about this tree?” she asked. It was a plain cottonwood, dull brown, the leaves full but the ordinary green of a Bubble Up bottle.

“This, I’ll have you know, is a perfect climbing tree.” He set his palm against the bark. “It’s got a good trunk. You can’t climb a tree if the trunk’s skinnier than you are. It’s got to be at least two, three times as thick as you.” He touched one of the lower boughs, twisted and hanging down. “It’s got branches low enough to reach. You can’t get up there if you can’t get on the first branch. The branches are close enough together to climb, and they’re sturdy. They don’t have to be as strong as the trunk, but they have to be pretty solid.” He stared up into the tangle of boughs. “You want to see?”

“Sure.”

He got onto the lowest branch and held out his hand to her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“You want to know what’s special about this tree,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

“I don’t climb trees.”

He looked at her like she’d said she didn’t eat, or didn’t own a Bible. “You’ve never climbed a tree?”

Her mother kept her out of trees. No damita dirtied her dress on maple boughs or fiddle-leaf figs. Abuela kept Lace’s male cousins on the ground too. Branches were where the crows lived, she told them.

“If I do, will you tell me your real name?” Lace asked. If she knew his name, she could fold it into the same place she hid his fallen feathers.

“Sure,” he said.

“Really?”

“I promise.” He took her hand and pulled her up, showing her where to brace her heel on the trunk.

“See?” he asked when she’d gotten her footing. “Easy, right?”

She pressed her back against the trunk.

“Stop looking down,” he said. “I’m not gonna let you fall. If I did, I’d have to find a replacement by call time tomorrow.”