The Weight of Feathers

They gathered and then dispersed like damselflies. They swam together and then staggered. Like his family’s show, it had the magic of seeming unplanned. The truth was probably that it took weeks of rehearsal. Every time they set up in a new place, they would’ve had to relearn the current of rivers, the depths of lakes, how fast to move, how far down to go.

He never saw them come up for air. They must have swum to the edges of the lake, taking their breaths behind rocks. He never saw them scramble either. They moved quickly, easily. They didn’t startle or scatter when the sky flashed, dry lightning that bleached the deepening blue.

The shells and pearls dotting their hair made them look crowned with their own small coral reefs. Light blinked off their bodies like fish scales speckled their skin. Some illusion faked with sequins or paint. The Palomas’ scales didn’t shine like that, not like the sheen of plastic. He knew that now.

The mermaids wove in and out of the sunken trees. They’d turned the drowned branches into their kelp forest. He couldn’t understand it, how the Paloma mermaids swam where two people had drowned. Even if they hated his family, the water had taken a man from theirs too. Their show was no different than if Cluck’s cousins had danced in the trees above a cemetery.

This was where a Corbeau died, a woman who took the name through marriage and who flitted in the trees so well her new family could not believe she wasn’t one of their own. He could almost see her walking those trees that now made up this drowned forest, flowers crowning her head. The sound of the river emptying into the lake was a little like glass chimes.

A mermaid flicked an orange-gold tail. He’d seen enough. Lace wasn’t there. Les sirènes swam as though they didn’t notice she was gone.

He walked along the river, following a path of candles burning in old glass jars. The mermaids must have found their way by these. By the time the show ended, they’d have nothing but the iris blue sky and the glow off these small candles.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said a woman’s voice.

He couldn’t find her right away. The light that made the lake glow couldn’t get down through the trees.

He spotted her sitting on a rock, her back straight as a birch trunk.

A loose-knit sweater hung off her. The way the waistband of her skirt cut across her body made her middle look soft. She had small eyes, round and shining like copper pennies. Her hair, thick as Cluck’s wrist, was braided down her back. But she couldn’t have been older than sixty, sixty-five at the most. Her wrinkles were thin and fine as the pleats of wild poppies.

Bright fabric covered her lap. A mermaid tail. She stitched beads on the fin, the moon winking off the needle. How did she sew in so little light? Maybe she worked by touch. The story in his family went that when Mémère had cataract surgery, she started crocheting a doily as soon as Pépère brought her home, bandages still on her eyes.

“Sorry,” he said.

She kept sewing.

“I’m looking for the pink mermaid,” he said, and cringed. It hadn’t sounded that creepy in his head. Now he was some guy stalking one of their performers.

The woman pulled her face from a slat of light. “She’s not with the show anymore.”

“What happened to her?” he asked.

She tied off the thread. “It’s not your business.”

Pain shot down through his ring finger, so sharp he looked for sparking at the nail. The woman was right. It wasn’t his business. If some tourist came asking where Margaux was, he’d tell him to get lost.

But Margaux had left them to go off with her boyfriend. The Palomas had thrown Lace out, made her an afterfeather like Cluck. Afterfeathers didn’t follow the same grain as remiges. They were smaller and messier than flight and tail feathers. Made of downy barbs, they shot out in different directions, fluffy and unruly.