“Thanks,” Lace said. “I’m okay.”
The woman stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Come on. Four times out of five the bus is late. No reason to stand out here.” She tilted her head toward the few tables inside. “They don’t mind.”
Lace came in and sat down. The girl at the register kept looking over at her. She glanced up after wiping down the counter, then after taking down her hair and fixing it up again.
It might have been a look for not buying anything. But Lace didn’t think she could stomach the coffee, so strong she could taste it in the air, or the few donuts left at this time of night, each with a sheen of hours-old grease. So she went up to the register and bought two coffee refills, one for the woman and another for the man she was sitting with. They both thanked her, whispered my goodness, what a nice girl.
The cashier kept looking over. She consolidated almost-empty bakery trays, and eyed Lace. She took apart a ballpoint pen that wouldn’t write, and looked over again.
Lace looked back at her. She found the girl’s face open and wide, the pink of a favorite prom dress.
This wasn’t mean staring. The girl couldn’t help it. Lace had forgotten the red on her cheek, deep and wet as pomegranate seeds.
The couple couldn’t help it either. They whispered between glances over to Lace’s table.
Then, around the time the cashier started drawing on napkins, the couple stopped whispering.
“You’re one of the mermaids,” the woman said.
Lace uncrossed her arms.
“We brought our granddaughter to see your show,” the man said. “We took her picture with you.”
“I don’t think so,” Lace said. She’d been in plenty of shows this summer, but had only taken pictures with the tourists once, the one night Abuela had promoted her. The night of the accident. The one time little girls studied the fin of her tail, wondering if it felt like a fish’s scales.
“You were the pink one, weren’t you?” The woman rested an elbow on the table, her hand in the smoke blue of her perm. “She said you were the prettiest mermaid.”
It never had anything to do with how pretty Lace or her cousins were. It was always about what tail they wore. Pink must have been their granddaughter’s favorite color. If a girl liked orange or gold, she called Martha the best mermaid. If she liked blue-green, it would be Emilia, with all those sea-colored pearls glittering in her hair.
The little girl Lace put makeup on had declared she’d wear a purple dress when she grew up and joined the show, so she would’ve picked Alexia, for that tail as purple as field milkwort.
Lace said thank you anyway. Moving her mouth knocked tears from the corners of her eyes. Twin drops fell, one from each lash line. The first traced a smooth trail. The other caught on the raw skin of her burn. The salt seared her cheek.
The man and woman’s kindness hurt. It made her hunch her shoulders and round her back.
She’d had one night as a mermaid close enough for posed pictures. At least someone would remember it. The little girl wouldn’t. She was too young. But her grandparents would. One day they’d pull the snapshot from an old album and remind her of when they took her to see mermaids.
Maybe they’d gone to see the fairies too. Lace didn’t ask.
She ran her fingers over her forearm, feeling the change in texture when they crossed the feather burn. For now it felt rougher, sand-coated. It would heal smooth, like dried amber. She held it to her mouth and kissed it, stroked it with her thumb. She clutched it against her body, let it spark through her. It kept her heart charged and alive.
The bus rolled into the parking lot. The groan of the brakes finished so high that Lace, the couple, and the cashier all flinched.
“That’s yours,” the cashier said. She smiled at them, even Lace, no shame from staring. Maybe she didn’t realize she had been. Lace was a junk thing on a road. A lost hubcap, or one of the strips of tire tread her father called los cocodrilos.
Lace got the door for the couple and their rolling suitcases, and then followed.
Clouds had turned the sky to pewter. A mist of water hit her skin.
She stopped, felt the drops sticking to her, dissolving her dress, turning her to wet silt.
The distance to the bus opened. It wasn’t the graded shelf of a lake where the sun reached the mud. It was a steep drop-off, where everything floated into the dark.
She backed toward the donut shop.
The woman caught her arm. “Don’t worry, just a little water. If my hair can take it, so can yours.”
Lace tried pulling away.
They had to feel it, the rain searing them. The woman’s blouse, printed with flowers big as hydrangeas, must have been some kind of cotton. Those flowers would fall to pieces, burning her skin underneath.
The woman tightened her grip. “They won’t wait,” she warned. “This town’s a nothing little stop to them. We had to make noise for them to keep it on their route.”
The man put a hand on Lace’s back. “Come on,” he said, and she remembered his voice, him talking to his granddaughter. Stand right there. Smile, Sierra.
Lace tried pulling on the woman’s arm. “We have to go,” she said, her voice not breaking a whisper. “We have to run.”
“Nobody’s running,” the woman said. “They know we’re coming. But if you go back inside, they’ll leave without you.”
Lace put her whole throat behind her voice. We have to run. But nothing came out this time, not even that weak whisper.
They’d all melt, like painted faces on wet canvas. This was no plain summer storm. It had teeth, and breath hot as a gas flame.
Pain flared through Lace’s body, like sandpaper rubbing the new skin on her burns.
She forced the sound stuck in her throat. It came out not in words, but in screaming. She screamed into the sky, looking for that spreading cloud. She wrenched herself out of the woman’s hold, but the man set his hands on her shoulders to lead her forward. She listened for the plant sirens under her own screaming, but there were only those two voices, telling her to calm down, there was no reason to get so upset.
The rain picked at her skin, peeling it back like old wallpaper. Sobbing punctured her screaming. They would all die here, because no one had turned the sirens on this time.
Her screaming pulled a crowd from the grocery store. They would die too, because of her, because she couldn’t turn the sound to words.
Palms spread across her back. Not the woman’s or her husband’s, but hands Lace knew. They carried the violet and ash scent of black salt. The wax and powder down of feathers. They came with a voice that told the man and the woman, “It’s okay, I know her, she’s with me.”
He held her against him, one hand in her hair, the other gripping her waist, and she couldn’t feel the rain anymore. She screamed into his shirt, sending the rage of unmade words into him. It vibrated through him to her hands on his back. The rain on her dress and his shirt would stick them to each other, dissolve the skin between them, until their veins tangled like roots, and they breathed together, one scaled and dark-feathered thing.
Les fruits défendus sont les plus doux.
Forbidden fruit is the sweetest.
He’d gotten her back to the trailer. More because she wanted to get away from the bus stop than because she wanted to go with him, but he’d take it.
He set water on the stove. He couldn’t stay mad at her. If she’d seemed mad at him, he could’ve kept it going. But she just sat on the built-in bed, wearing one of his shirts, crying into the sleeves that hung past her hands.
She stopped for a minute, saw the makeup stains her eyes had left on the cuffs, and started crying again.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll come out.”