The Weight of Feathers

The woman laughed again.

Lace bit the knuckle of her forefinger. She hadn’t meant to sound so surprised. They had similar voices, but didn’t look much alike. Though Cluck wasn’t small, his brother’s shadow would have swallowed him whole.

“La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants,” the woman said.

Lace didn’t ask what that meant. If the woman wanted her to know, she’d have said it in English.

Nicole set out Lace’s foundation, concealer, and powder. “This is what you use?”

“It’s what I used to use.”

“And now?”

Lace had tried. The covering up only drew attention, made the burn look like a deep patch of scar tissue. The reddening on her arms would fade. The dead skin would peel back and fall away. But her shoulder had pressed her sleeve hard against her face that night, quickening the reaction. Even once the burn on her cheek healed, it would leave a bad scar, hard to hide.

“It makes it look worse,” she said.

Nicole opened the powder compact, turning it so the mirror caught Lace’s reflection. “Show me what you are doing.”

This was all vinegar, having to be polite to a woman who stared at her marred face. But Lace did it, spread on a good layer of foundation and concealer, finished with powder. Not for Abuela, but for her father and Tía Lora.

Lace set the powder brush down. She lifted her chin to show the woman her face, her right cheek rough and mottled.

“Je comprends,” the woman said. “Now wash your face.”

“Excuse me?” Lace asked.

“I will show you how to fix it.”

“I know how to do makeup.”

“No,” Nicole said. “You know how to do show makeup. It won’t help you with your own. And if you cannot do your own face, how will they trust your hands?”

None of them seemed to mind the night before. They’d all sat down one at a time and let her put on their bases and colors.

“Your work is good for the shows,” Nicole said. “But for you, for daylight, it is too heavy. Wash your face.”

It was easier to do it than argue. Lace scrubbed off the makeup at the downstairs sink, gritting her teeth against the soap.

She came back with her face heat-reddened, and sat down, her thin scarf tied to her arm to hide the feather burn.

Nicole sponged a little foundation over her face, then concealer. She brushed the lightest layer of powder over Lace’s cheeks and forehead, then a little more base, then powder again. “Better to use a light hand many times than a heavy hand once.”

Lace clenched her back teeth to keep from wincing, her skin still raw enough that bristles and foam pads stung.

Nicole swirled blush onto her cheeks, swept on eye shadow with a few flicks of a brush, handed her a lipstick. Lace dabbed it onto her mouth and rubbed her lips together.

Nicole set the compact mirror into Lace’s hands. “Regarde.”

Lace opened her eyes. The coral on her cheeks and lips stood out. Her eyelashes looked pure black against the cream shadow.

The burn on her cheek was still there, still visible. Just fainter, a little discoloration under a veil of sand. In the right light, if Lace wore her hair down, it might go unnoticed. In the dusk and globe lights, she could pass for almost pretty.

“How’d you do that?” Lace asked.

“A light hand, and patience,” Nicole said. “You teach people what to see.”

Ne réveillez pas le chat qui dort.

Don’t wake the cat who sleeps.

Cluck watched his mother standing at the kitchen counter, picking lavender from a dish of herbes de Provence. Every time she bought a jar, she never noticed the violet buds until she got home, when she cursed in French as though it were her first language.

Years ago Cluck used to do this. His mother and Dax figured out that telling six-year-old Cluck to pick out all those tiny buds would keep him out of the way for a couple of hours. “Look, we have found a way for you to be useful to this family,” she’d say.

Cluck leaned on the door frame, thinking of how different Lace looked now that his mother had gotten ahold of her. Still pretty, but painted. Her skin looked made of powder and blush.

“Did you have to do that to her?” he asked.

She flicked the lavender into another bowl. If Clémentine didn’t ask for it, she’d throw it out. “Do what to who?”

“Lace,” he said. “All that makeup. She looks like a pageant contestant.”

“You hired a girl to do makeup, and you don’t like that she wears it?”

His mother couldn’t act like she didn’t have a hand in this. He’d seen that same look on half the girls in this family.

“I know your work,” he said.

“And she thanked me.” She shook the dish. “Now she looks us in the eye. This is a good thing in the girl we trust with our faces.”

He’d liked seeing Lace the way she was the night before, without anything covering her face, her lipstick almost the same deep red as the patch on her cheek. Nothing between that wound and the air it needed to heal.

If she had to scrub off all that makeup every night, her burn would take twice as long to scar over.

“Three days ago, she was in a hospital,” he said. “She doesn’t need someone telling her to cover up something that just happened to her.”

“Girls need what they need to feel pretty,” his mother said.

“She’s pretty without it,” he said.

His mother lifted her eyes from the counter, catching him in her peripheral vision.

He crossed his arms. This way his mother had of looking down at him even though he was taller than she was made him want to take up as little space as possible.

“Careful,” she said.

There were only a handful of people with the show who weren’t Corbeaus by blood or marriage. And everyone, not just Cluck, had to follow one simple rule: don’t touch them.

But there were more rules for Cluck. Cluck was everything bad about his father, and Dax was everything good, chaff and wheat like the verse in Matthew. When Dax asked about their father, aunts burst with stories about how handsome and tall he was, how when he played the euphonium it sounded like the breath of un séraphin. When Cluck asked, they looked at him as if he’d been the one to make their father leave. They reminded him that the man had left so completely after Cluck was born that they did not even know for sure what county he was in now. Inyo, they guessed? Monterey maybe?

Cluck, the bad son, was only allowed to talk to girls Dax and his mother chose for him. Girls they met at churches they would never bring Cluck to. Girls they thought would grow into women who might make him something less dangerous than he was.

Lace was not one of them. And now Lace worked for the show. He couldn’t have found a girl more off-limits to him in Saint Mary’s Convent.

“Cygnon,” his mother said as he was leaving.

The nickname stopped Cluck in the door frame. Until Eugenie came up with “Cluck,” for the way the fingers on his left hand looked like a rooster’s claw, Dax got all the cousins to call him le cygnon, for having no more contour feathers than a young swan, gray and ugly.

Dax and his mother still called Cluck cygnon sometimes, Dax’s way of pointing out that all the other Corbeaus had feathers that were stiff and neat, narrow on the leading edge and wider along the inner vane. And they were the true black of forest crows, not red-streaked like Cluck’s. Cluck’s hadn’t changed as much from when he was small, when his first feathers grew in fluffy and short. They weren’t natal fluff anymore, but they’d only developed into semiplumes, a cross between a cygnet’s fuzz and a flight feather.

Cluck turned around.

His mother kept picking out lavender. “Your brother would like to talk to you.”

Cluck slid his hands into his pockets, hiding his wrecked fingers in the lining.

This wasn’t an order to go find his brother.

Dax would find him.

Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.

Raise crows and they will peck your eyes out.

Lace held an eye shadow brush under the bathroom tap, flooding out the color she couldn’t get with rubbing alcohol the night before. Lilac-tinted water swirled down the drain.

One of the Corbeau women pushed on the half-open door. Lace couldn’t remember her name. Only that the dress she wore for the show was yellow as a pear.

“Excuse-moi.” She reached past Lace for a bottle of perfume all the Corbeau girls shared.

Lace nodded to the woman’s reflection. At first she’d kept the door closed, but cleaning the brushes took so long that every few minutes a Corbeau woman knocked, wanting the mirror so she could fix her lipstick on her way out to the Blackberry Festival. After the second time, Lace gave up and just left the bathroom door open.

She’d wondered what about those booths and fruit stands thrilled them so much until Eugenie sighed and said, “So many farmers’ sons,” as she combed her hair.

The woman sprayed on a little perfume, and the room filled up with a warm, sweet smell like cardamom. All wrong for the weather, but if the Corbeau girls wanted to stand out among all the powdery flower perfumes, that was how to do it.

The woman rubbed one wrist against the other, eyeing the brushes. “How’d you get stuck with that job?”

“Someone has to.” Lace pressed water out of the rinsed bristles. “And I don’t mind.”

“Better you than me.” The woman set the bottle back on the counter. “Next time use the sink upstairs,” she said on her way out. “Horrible little mirror. No one will bother you.”

Forget it. Lace would rather do all this at two in the morning than go upstairs. Being in this house was bad enough.

Lace laid out the brushes to dry, the chatter of a few Corbeau girls rounding the side of the house and then moving too far away to hear.

A door slammed at the other end of the hall, and Lace jumped. So many Corbeaus had left the house in the last few hours—off on errands or enjoying the free hours before tonight’s show—that she’d thought the whole downstairs was empty.

Even from the bathroom doorway, Lace could hear the muffled yelling. She patted her hands dry on her skirt and took slow steps to the other end of the hall, trying to keep the old wood quiet.

She stopped at the closed door, making out two voices she was just starting to learn, and the clipped sound of skin hitting skin.

“Who is this girl?” one voice asked. Dax, the man who’d stood over Lace and the blond woman.

“She’s from around here,” the second answered. Cluck.

Dax chuckled. “She’s from around here. Well, that fixes everything, doesn’t it?” Then came the thud of a body hitting a dresser or a wall. “We don’t know enough about her. She could be a thief.”

Lace pressed herself into the door, listening against the wood.

“That’s what everyone thinks we are,” Cluck said, his voice strained with trying to get his air back. “So I take that as a recommendation.”

“You don’t get to make that kind of decision on your own.”

Guilt pinched at the back of Lace’s neck. It crackled down her body, spreading through her escamas.

“Do you want me to fire her?” Cluck asked. “She’s good. You saw her work.”

“Les mecs,” a voice behind Lace whispered, close enough to warm her shoulder.

Lace startled, tripping on the hallway carpet.

Nicole Corbeau passed by, shaking her head. “Il faut que jeunesse se passe, n’est-ce pas?” She rolled her eyes at Lace, ready for her to agree.

The alcohol and sharp floral scent of Nicole Corbeau’s perfume slipped into Lace’s open mouth and needled her throat.

This woman had given her back her face. She’d told Lace about dyeing Eugenie’s hair red, teaching the blonder Corbeaus to coat their feathers in cake flour, showing Violette and Margaux how to bleach their freckles with salt and lemon juice. And now she kept on her way down the hall, taking out her earrings, gliding by the room where one of her sons was beating the other?

Lace waited for Nicole Corbeau to shut herself in her bedroom. Then she put her body back against the door, and listened.

“She’s good,” Cluck said. “She doesn’t even use her fingers. Just brushes, sponges, Q-tips.”

“So she’s a germaphobe,” Dax said. “Wonderful.”

Lace’s fingers worried the doorknob. She thought of opening the door, wondered if that would make things worse for Cluck later.

“You shouldn’t have gone around me.” Lace heard the snap of Dax’s fist on Cluck’s skin.

What was Cluck doing? It didn’t sound like he was fighting back, but he was still talking. He took what Dax did to him, but did not let it make him silent.

“We were screwed,” Cluck said. His words sounded wet, and Lace wondered if there was blood in his mouth. “We needed her.”

“You should have asked me,” Dax said. Again, the sound of Cluck’s back against the wallpaper. “I would’ve given her a shot.”

Lace could almost make out Cluck’s breathing, faint as far-off rain.

“Then give her one,” he said.

She heard a body hitting the floor. Older brother throwing the younger one down against the baseboard.

The guilt knocked around in her, a heavy bead inside a jewelry box, rubbing down the velvet lining.

Dax’s footsteps made the floorboards whine, and Lace ran down the hallway.

She opened the refrigerator and stared in, showing Dax she’d been there all along, of course she hadn’t been listening.

Dax passed her and said nothing.

She turned her head, checking on what she already knew. Dax wasn’t bleeding. His hair looked neat as it had before last night’s show.

Dax slammed the back door, and the window blinds rattled.

Lace took off her scarf, filled it with half a freezer tray of ice, carried it back down the hallway.

Cluck sat on the floor of that room, arms resting on his knees. A dot of blood broke the line of his bottom lip. Sweat stuck his hair to the back of his neck.

Lace stepped through the half-open door. The screech of the hinges made him look up.

She stood over him, offering the scarf full of ice.

He gave her a weak laugh. “Cute.” He took it and held it to his cheek.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Well, I gotta let him win one every now and then. It’s good for morale.”

He didn’t look at her. The flush in his jawline and neck showed his embarrassment. She should’ve gone back to Clémentine’s trailer and pretended she hadn’t heard anything.

Standing over him felt cruel, rubbing it in even if she didn’t mean it that way. So she sat on the floor, a good five feet between them. “What happened?”

He retied the scarf. “Nothing. We were just talking.”

“You were just talking?”

“This is kinda what it looks like when we talk.”

No wonder he hadn’t panicked when her cousins cornered him. He was used to it. His brother could hit him, and his mother wouldn’t look up.

Cluck wasn’t in his family’s show. Whether he’d wanted to be or not, she doubted he’d had the choice. This family called him a name that suited a hen better than a man.

Her mother would tell her she must have a fever to feel sorry for a Corbeau. But this boy had all the mal in him of being a Corbeau when the Corbeaus didn’t even like him.

“Could I ask you something?” she said.

He nodded and rested the back of his head against the wallpaper.

“That night,” she said. “What were you doing out in that part of the woods?”

“I was trying to find Eugenie.” No flinch of lying in his face. Only the tired look of remembering. “The mixing tank blew, and nobody knew where she was.”

Maybe Cluck hadn’t put the net in the water. Maybe he wasn’t the reason Lace was late getting out of the river. All of that could not live inside his body. Enough malice to go trapping mermaids. Enough worry to keep track of his cousins. Enough fearlessness of the poison in that rain to help Lace when he did not know her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You said that already.”

But this time she meant it.

“Don’t worry.” He turned his head, his temple against the wall. “We’re good.”

They weren’t good. She owed him however long he’d make her stay, however many nights cleaning brushes and fixing eye shadow he wanted. She’d work off the feather scar, stop fighting against the debt and just pay it.

Cluck got up, smoothed out his shirt, held out his hand to help her up. Burns had reddened his palm, leaving his skin uneven as raw citrine.

That night outside the liquor store, she hadn’t known his last name. The night of the accident, she’d seen the feather, but her skin was too covered in poison to fight. But right now, she had no excuse. Taking his hand would mean touching a Corbeau on purpose.

But taking his hand was less of a betrayal to her family than touching any other Corbeau. These people, Cluck’s own family, hated him. They didn’t say it but she felt it, like heat under the earth. His hand looked like it had gotten broken all at once, maybe slammed in a door, or crushed under a costume trunk. If these people loved him, they would’ve gotten him to a doctor in time to save his fingers.

If she hated him, she’d be like them, their scorn of Cluck Corbeau the same as a shared eye color. It would make her one of them.

But she could defy this family by touching him.

She shut her eyes, took his hand, let him pull her to standing. The grain of his burns gliding over hers stung. The heat of his hand radiated through her wrist. If she squeezed her eyes shut harder, she could hear Abuela’s gasp like the rush of the river’s current.

But it didn’t kill her. And it didn’t make her father and Tía Lora feel any farther away.

“Nice work last night,” Cluck said. “You’re good. And fast. Where’d you learn?”

“Community theater on the weekends.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Sure, you are.”

“Seventeen.”

The raise of his eyebrows showed the swelling along his temple. If he didn’t keep ice on it, he’d get a bruise.

“In September,” she said.

“Does your family know where you are?”

“No,” she said.

“Are they looking?”

“Fat chance.”

He shrugged, a look telling her he wouldn’t push it. He kept the ice on his jaw and stepped into the hallway.

“Cluck?” she said.

He turned around.

“All those feathers,” she said. “Do you kill peacocks for them?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Where do you get them?” she asked.

He thumbed a blood spot off his lip. “You really want to know?”