The Weight of Feathers (32 page)

Lucien
. The name stilled him in a way that made Lace sure it was his. He hadn’t even told her when she asked. He’d just given her Luc, the first syllable. He’d let her take off his shirt before he’d been willing to let her have those last three letters.

“How do you know that name?” he asked.

“I gave you that name,”
Tía
Lora said.

Cluck sat down and dragged his fingers through his hair, holding his head in his hands.
Tía
Lora put her palm on his back, and Lace could guess what she whispered. These were the words she needed to say to him.
Él era tu padre y yo soy tu madre.

He was your father, and I am your mother.

Cluck would not know the words, but he’d understand the meaning, the sum of all these things she’d said.

He moved his hands to his eyes. When Lace stilled her breathing, she could hear him sobbing into them, the gasps in for air, the wet breaking at the back of his throat. His tears spread over the heels of his palms. His wrists shone wet.

Tía
Lora and her truths had broken him. These things he did not know broke him. These were things he should have learned over years. That way they might have worn into him slowly, water cutting a place in rock. This way, all at once, they cracked him like shale.

“I killed him,” Cluck said. “I was supposed to take care of him and I didn’t.”

Lace’s fingernails worried the paint on the door frame. This was what he thought? That his grandfather’s death was on him?

Tía
Lora rubbed her palm up and down his back. The forwardness of it, like she’d been doing it since he was small, made Lace part her lips midbreath.
Tía
Lora had never been a woman anyone would call bold. But now that she could touch this lost son, she treated him like there was no question he belonged to her.

“You know that’s not true,”
Tía
Lora told Cluck.

Cluck let out a rough laugh, quiet and small. “I do?”

“You should.”
Tía
Lora put a hand under his chin to make him look at her. “Because I do.”

The pain didn’t leave Cluck’s face. But Lace saw one small break in it, a second of easing up, like a candle flame darkening before the wick caught again.

He almost believed
Tía
Lora. The only person who could tell him he didn’t kill the man he did not know was his father was the woman he did not know was his mother.

He pressed his lips together, hiding the faint tint of violet Lace always looked for on the inside of his lower lip.

This possibility, that Alain Corbeau being gone was not his fault, was putting another handful of cracks in him.

But
Tía
Lora did not let him splinter. She got him to his feet, took the black wings off the bed and tied them to his body. She fastened the ribbons, her hands as gentle and sure as if he’d always been hers. Like she would have buttoned his coat when he was six, straightened his collar when he was ten, fixed his tie when he was fifteen.

He straightened his shoulders, holding up those dark wings.

“Eres perfecto y eres hermoso,
” Lora Paloma said, her voice still low.
You are perfect, and you are beautiful.

Cluck shut his eyes, salt drying on his cheeks. He nodded without understanding. If he had understood, he might not have nodded. He did not believe he was perfect or beautiful. But if no one told him what
Tía
Lora’s words meant, he would nod, and she would think he believed.

Lace kept a last handful of secrets for both of them. She did not tell Cluck that Lora Paloma had wanted a child worse than she wanted her own breath. That the only reason she hadn’t had one before Cluck was that her husband had beaten every life out of her but her own. This man the Palomas had called a martyr the night the lake took him.

Tía
Lora had told Lace that part, and then asked her to forget it.

Lace hadn’t told
Tía
Lora that Cluck had grown up never knowing when his brother might leave a bruise on his temple or throw him against a piece of rented furniture. She didn’t tell her that, to Cluck, trees were as much a place to hide as a way to find the sky.

This was the bond they shared that they’d never know. They had both been beaten by men who decided that the only things worth less than their souls were their bodies.

Cluck said something to
Tía
Lora. She nodded, and he left.

“Go with him,”
Tía
Lora said. “Tell him to wait. Tell him not now.”

So Lace caught up in the motel hallway. Even down, his left wing brushed the wall. The black primaries grazed the yellowing paper.

“You okay?” Lace asked.

“No,” he said. “No. Not really.”

“Where are you going?”

He shoved through a side door. He held it open behind him, but didn’t look back at her. “I’ve got some questions for my family. Or, not my family.”

She followed him across the parking lot. He did not go toward the road. He went to the edge of the property that backed against the trees.

“Speaking of family, I guess you and I are, what?” He worked out the math. “Second cousins?”

“First cousins once removed.” She’d done the math on the back of a napkin that morning. “But we’re not blood related.”

She was no more related to him than she was to any other Corbeau. But if her family had let
Tía
Lora keep him, he would have been a Paloma, the only one who neither had Paloma blood nor had married into the family. Lace would have grown up sharing school lessons with him, talking him into swimming, making fun of him if she ever caught him pulling out the feathers under his hair.

But even with the Paloma name, those feathers would have stopped her family from claiming him as theirs, the same as the streaks of red and his left-handedness left him a little outside the Corbeaus.

“Well, there’s a silver lining, huh?” he said.

She could feel him grasping at it, looking for a way to make this funny. This was the best he could do. He was reaching for the joke, and his hands found this because it hurt less than anything else. This was how he broke things into pieces small enough to hold.

She got in front of him and stopped him. “You sure you wanna do this now?” she asked. The Corbeaus must have still been in their mourning clothes.

“No, I don’t. I want to do this ten years ago. Hell, I’d settle for a week ago.” He scratched at his cheek, where his tears had dried into salt. “But now is the best I can get.”

Le loup retourne toujours au bois.

The wolf always goes back to the woods.

“Cluck?”

He heard Lace saying his name, but didn’t answer.

He understood now. It clicked into place like the last wire on a wing frame. It slashed at him, a knife grown dull from sitting in a drawer. It left a line of little scratches instead of a clean cut.

Pépère
had been careful. He’d given Cluck the quiet space to use his left hand and climb trees higher than any in the show. He’d never fought his own daughter on the show’s schedule or not taking Cluck to church, because Nicole Corbeau knew the secret that could always get him to back down.

Pépère
had felt like more than a grandfather because he was. He showed Cluck more patience than he showed his other grandchildren because Cluck was not one of them.

This was why
Pépère
let Cluck wear his old clothes even when he thought he shouldn’t, because they let him be something more to Cluck than what his children had decided.

“Cluck.” She held his arm to stop him. “I need to know you can hear me.”

“I can hear you,” he said, and kept walking.

She went with him.

He didn’t like looking at her. Every time he saw the dark stain of the wound on her cheek, he remembered that the plant hadn’t just sealed her dress to her body that night. They hadn’t just killed
Pépère
with the things they’d sent into the air. They’d caused the accident that killed a Corbeau who’d just learned to walk the highest branches.

They’d turned the Corbeaus and the Palomas from rivals to enemies.

These were the things they’d done that his grandfather would never tell him. And he thought of all of them when he saw Lace.

But she was his witness, the girl who would speak for Lora Paloma when Lora Paloma would not cross the woods to speak for herself. If they wanted to hurt Lace, they would have to kill him.

“Why the hell did my grandfather go along with this?” he asked.

“Because he didn’t want you growing up with everyone thinking you were born because he raped your mother,” Lace said.

“I wouldn’t have thought that.”

Now
Pépère
would never know that the lie wasn’t Lora Paloma’s. She had been the one to pull it back. But it had been too late. The Palomas’ lies had already rained over the whole town. Nothing Lora Paloma said could make them forget.

His family had kept him from knowing his father as his father, and the Palomas had kept him from knowing his mother at all.

There wasn’t enough of him to hate them all. He’d been able to hate the Palomas because he loved
Pépère,
even if he didn’t love the woman he’d thought was his mother and the man he’d thought was his brother. Now he didn’t have that love to push against, to give the hate direction. So the hate drifted, unanchored, trying to find a current. It turned over inside him, the edges catching his lungs and heart and stomach. He didn’t know how to hate unless he had something to love.

“Lace.”

“What?” she asked, and he realized he’d said her name out loud.

“Nothing.” He’d been thinking her name but hadn’t meant to speak it. “Sorry.”

Lace. He could love her. The Palomas had thrown her away too, and she would never be a Corbeau, no matter how many of their faces she painted. He couldn’t even make her one, because he wasn’t one. That he was both Corbeau and Paloma made him neither.

It didn’t matter if he had no Paloma blood. Lora had become a Paloma, taken the name, spent so many years among them they had become her family. The Corbeau and Paloma in him would not mix, like the almond oil and apple cider vinegar Clémentine put on her hair. She could shake the bottle, but the two liquids always pulled apart. He felt himself separating out, becoming two things in one body, one half of him Corbeau and the other Paloma. He was one of the half-leucistic peacocks his grandfather had shown him in books. A pale body patched with blue, a tail fan that was half-white and half-green.

He stopped and looked at Lace. “Go back,” he said. “Stay with…” He got caught on what to call the woman he had just met for the second time.
Your great-aunt. Lora. My mother.

Before he could decide, Lace said, “No.”

He breathed out. “Please? I don’t want you over there. Not for this.”

“If you’re going, I’m coming with you.”

“They’re gonna blame you for telling me.” The white wings wouldn’t do her any favors either. Maybe none of his family spoke Spanish, but they knew what Paloma meant as well as Lace knew what Corbeau meant.

“I’m not going back unless you come with me,” she said.

He saw the wager in her eyes, her bet that if she refused to let him do this alone, she could get him to turn back.

“Then I guess you’re coming with me.” He kept going, and she kept up.

He’d stand between her and his family if he had to, his wings making him a feathered shield.

How many of them already knew?
Pépère,
now in the ground, the truth clutched against his chest with
Mémère
’s finest doily. Cluck’s mother, and her brother and sisters.

Did Dax? Did Eugenie and his other cousins? Had they wondered why Cluck looked so little like Dax or his mother and so much like old photographs of
Pépère
?

“My mother.” The word felt wrong in his mouth. “Her. Nicole. She doesn’t even like me.”

“No,” Lace said. “She doesn’t.”

That almost made him laugh. He liked that Lace wasn’t trying to make any of this soft.

“Then why would she agree to this?” he asked.

“Because your family told her to,” Lace said.

“She hates me. She could’ve said no.”

“Really?” Lace asked, the word so sharp Cluck felt it.

“Good point,” he said.

Lace knew better than anyone. Once her family came down on her for that feather on her arm, no one short of God himself could help her. In this way, the Corbeaus were no different from the Palomas. Nicole Corbeau’s word may have ruled now, but no one got to make Corbeau law without years of following them first.

What Cluck was hadn’t made Nicole Corbeau hate him. That he was at all had. It made his rage toward her both smaller and sharper.

Cluck laughed, the noise slight but sudden.

“What?” Lace asked.

“You know I’ve never seen my birth certificate?” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Nicole Corbeau had made sure of it. When he went to the DMV for his driver’s license, she had kept it for him, not even letting him hold it long enough to look. She’d told him he’d lose it. He’d taken it the same as he took every other time she rolled her eyes or turned her back. That he was stupid, bad, ugly.

He wanted his birth certificate, the original. He wanted to hold that slip of paper, read it.

He wondered if his grandfather ever thought of leaving with him. But after the plant fired him,
Pépère
had fallen in with the family, given up on getting another engineering job, knowing he’d never get a good reference out of the Almendro plant. The only place for him and Cluck was with the rest of the family. The once-engineer, and
le cygnon
who did not turn white as he got older but only grew darker.

In the dark, Cluck couldn’t tell if they’d reached the part of the woods closer to his family than hers. He waited for some shift in the air, like the trailing edge of a cold front, wet warmth turning to ice crystals.

Lace gripped Cluck’s arm, stopping him.