The Weight of Feathers

Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.

A door must be open or shut.

Cluck opened the Morris Cowley’s passenger side. He watched Lace stare into the truck cab. The look on her face wasn’t fear, the skittishness of a bitten animal, un chat échaudé qui craint l’eau froide. It was suspicion.

People always found something they didn’t like about his family. They were Romani. They were French. They were show people. The traveling kind.

“Did you think we brought a flock with us everywhere?” he asked. “If you want to know where I get the feathers, we’re gonna have to drive there.”

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

He laughed. He liked that she wanted to know that before she decided whether she was getting in the truck, but it didn’t mean he was gonna tell her. Everyone called him Cluck. His real name wasn’t any more of her business than her family was his.

“Sven,” he said.

“No, really. What’s your real name?”

“Rupert.”

She shook her head and got in. “What’s your real name?” she asked, a last try.

He didn’t blame her. In the fairy tales Eugenie told Noe and Mason, the number three was a charm. Anything—kissing a lover to break a curse, piercing an enemy with a dagger—had to be tried three times before it worked.

But he wasn’t a locked door or enchanted tree. He wasn’t telling her his real name just because she kept asking.

“Le bâtard,” he said, the words slipping from his mouth before he could pull them back. This was what his older relatives called him when they thought he couldn’t hear. Even when he was little, this was his name to them. Le bâtard. Bastard. It didn’t matter that Dax and Cluck had the same father, that he had left them both without marrying their mother. Dax was fatherless, but Cluck was le bâtard.

“How do you spell that?” Lace asked.

“I’m kidding,” he said.

It was fair. She didn’t know his name. He didn’t know why she wasn’t with her family. It wasn’t his business. He didn’t care to add to the stories about les Roms stealing gadje children, but the flinch of her eyelashes made him think she was telling the truth, that nobody was looking for her.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked after he started the truck.

“Rogue rhinoceros,” he said.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked again.

“Jousting accident.”

She looked out the window as he pulled the truck onto the road. “It wasn’t your dominant hand, was it?”

“No. It wasn’t.”

It was a lie and not a lie. He’d started out left-handed, still was when no one but his grandfather was watching. His family’s French blood disapproved of left-handedness. Witches greeted Satan avec la main gauche, they said, so no Corbeau would write or stitch with his left hand. “We only see ghosts if we look to our left,” warned one aunt. “Le Diable moves our left hand more easily than our right,” added another. A third, “The Devil watches us over the left shoulder.”

Mémère, according to Pépère, always called them superstitious old women and shooed them out of her kitchen when they started talking that way. Cluck would’ve liked to see that.

“You’re lucky,” Lace said. “It could’ve been the hand you used more.”

“Yep. I’m lucky alright.” He rolled down the window. Highway air rushed through the cab. It brought the smell of diesel fuel and wild sorrel, and the sharp green hint of onion fields.

He noticed Lace pinching the air, catching one of his feathers. She held it by the calamus and turned it between her fingers.

The back of his neck grew hot. He kept his eyes on the highway’s white lines, pretending he hadn’t noticed.

She held it in the wind, letting the air ruffle the downy barbs. He felt it, and the chill made him shiver.

When they got to Elida Park, Lace folded the feather she’d caught into her palm, and tucked it into her pocket.

He helped her down from the truck, and the sight of the cats and peacocks made her catch her breath in her chest. Calicoes and tabbies sprawled in patches of light, and the great birds strutted across the crabgrass.

“Where’d they all come from?” she asked.

“The cats come because the locals feed ’em,” Cluck said. “The birds are here thanks to some idiot who ordered a cock and hen from a mail-order catalog ten years ago.”

“Mail-order peacocks?” she asked. “Was this before or after the rogue rhinoceros?”

“It’s true,” he said. “His wife couldn’t take the way they shriek, so he just left them here. Unfixed, so you know the rest.”

An orange tabby sunned itself on the lower rung of a wooden fence. A young peacock swept by, its fan down.

Lace winced, waiting for one to attack the other.

“Don’t worry,” Cluck said. “They get along enough.”

He picked up a shed feather, pulled garden shears from his back pocket and clipped it. He threw the lower half to an adolescent tortoiseshell cat. It chewed on the hollow shaft, back feet kicking the feather barbs.

“How do you get enough feathers if you pick them up one at a time?” Lace asked.

“I don’t. They’re not shedding much now, but come the end of summer, they’ll molt.” The feathers would half-carpet the ground, like la couleur of fruit blossom petals turning the ground pink in spring.

A gasp parted Lace’s lips, one breath away from a laugh.

Cluck knew why before he looked up.

They both watched the white peacock shake itself out of the tall grasses. The bird took one slow step, then another, his body so covered in white Cluck always expected it to dust the ground like powdered sugar.

Cluck crouched so he’d look smaller. It made the birds shed their skittishness like molted feathers. He didn’t ask Lace to. She wasn’t much taller than the peacock’s upright tail fan.

The peacock took one step into the sun, like toeing cold water. In full light, he looked made of the fringe off white bearded irises.

He dropped a single tail feather, long as Cluck’s arm, and left to follow after a peahen with eyes like black marbles.

Cluck lifted the plume off the grass, cradling it so the stem wouldn’t bend, and clipped the hollow shaft of the calamus.

“You’re gonna touch that?” Lace asked.

“I’m not gonna catch anything.”

“No,” she said. “I mean because it’s white.”

He got up from his crouch. “And?”

“I don’t know. I thought since yours are black.”

He laughed. “I have black feathers, so I won’t touch white ones? No.” Was that one of the rumors going around Almendro? Just because the name of that other family meant “dove”? None of them despised the Palomas for their name, or even for the white scales that showed up on their bodies. It had never been about doves or birthmarks.

It had always been about what they’d done.

He handed Lace the eyespot. “If you look close, it’s not all white.”

She held it in the light, tilting the left side down, then the right. Most of the feather was pale as bleached linen, but from different angles, the iridescence on the eyespot showed tints of color. Pollen-dust yellow. Traces of blue, like bits of sky and robin’s eggs. Dusk colors, violet blue and bluish lavender. A pink that matched Lace’s mouth when her lipstick wore off.

Now she laughed, light as the colors on the eyespot.

“It’s because of the white,” he said.

“Because white has every color,” Lace said.

Pépère would like her for knowing things like that.

They stood there as the light fell, watching until the peacocks scattered.

Having her there made him look at the birds a little less. When she was watching, he could watch her. He could study how her skin and her eyes and hair were all gradations of the same color, lighter to darker. The only parts of her face that broke the sequence was the pink on her lips and the deep red on her cheek, like crushed raspberries. If he stopped thinking of how much it must have hurt her, that patch on her cheek was beautiful.

“You hungry?” Cluck asked when he started the Morris Cowley. “Or do you always wait until the middle of the night to eat?”

She reached over the gearshift and shoved his upper arm.

“Oh, good,” he said. “You’re becoming a Corbeau.”

Her eyes opened a little wider.

“I was kidding,” he said.

The park disappeared into the rearview.

“It’s not catching, I promise,” he said. “You’re not gonna grow feathers from being around us.”

She nodded and looked out the window. She may or may not have believed him.

Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.

Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.

Before she and Cluck left the roadhouse where they’d stopped, Lace bought two postcards. One showed a field of wild poppies, the other a pasture flecked with cows. Both smelled of syrup and fryer grease.

She set them on the dashboard and filled in the River Fork’s address, the truck’s speed making her pen wobble. If she and Cluck stopped before the county line, they’d have Tulare postmarks.

Cluck glanced across the front seat. “Who’re you writing to?”

“My family,” she said.

On both, she wrote “Greetings from Terra Bella, con cariño,” and then the four curled letters of her signature.

“I thought they didn’t care where you were,” he said.

“I never said they didn’t care.” She added Tía Lora’s name and room number to the poppies, then her father’s to the cows. First names only, in case Cluck had good enough vision to read her handwriting. “I said they weren’t looking.”

The latch on the passenger side door clicked, and it swung open. The pavement rushed past like white water, and Lace choked on her own gasp. Fields flew by, speed turning them to liquid. The scent of new onions stung her throat.

“Dammit,” Cluck said, like he’d cut himself or touched the handle of a hot pan.

The wind ripped the postcards off the dashboard. They twirled like leaves and flew out toward the road. They shrank to two white flecks against the sky, and then vanished.

Lace’s body felt insubstantial, untethered. She grabbed at the door, but couldn’t reach.

Cluck pulled her toward the middle of the front seat and set her hand on the steering wheel. “Hold this.”

She gripped the wheel so they didn’t swerve. It didn’t take much to make the truck drift, but a lot of tug on the wheel to get it straight again. The truck’s weight pulled on the steering column.

“Cluck,” she said, but he was already leaning behind her, reaching for the door.

He tried to keep one foot over the brake. Cluck’s side grazed her back, her hip against his, his hair brushing her arm.

Cluck clicked the latch back into place and swung the door shut, one hand on the back of the seat to steady himself. She shifted her weight to move out of the way, and ended up half on his lap. Their bodies tangled like roots as they got back to where they’d been.

She wouldn’t have caught Cluck’s laughs if she hadn’t been so close to him. They were short, quiet, the same low pitch as the air pulling past the cab. They intertwined with Lace’s, her hands still sparking with the feeling of him giving her the wheel like she knew how to hold it.

The truck streaked off the highway and through town, and they pulled onto the Corbeaus’ rented land.

“Sorry,” Cluck said. “That happens sometimes.”

“You could’ve told me,” Lace said, the breath of a laugh still under her words. “I would’ve held onto the door.”

“No one’s ever in this thing who doesn’t already know.” He downshifted. “Besides, it’s never happened before when the truck’s not speeding.”

“You were speeding.”

He set it into park. “Really?”

“By about ten miles,” she said. “Why didn’t you just pull over?”

“It was a soft shoulder. We would’ve gone straight into a ditch.”

“Then get the door fixed.”

He leaned over her and opened the passenger side. “It’s a problem with the striker.” His fingers followed the latch’s grooves. “It’s a tough part to find.” He turned his head, and then flinched, like he hadn’t realized how close he was to her.

The idea fluttered along her rib cage that if she touched him again, she would turn to dust or fire. She lifted her hand to his face, wanting to know if it was true.

But the whispers from the other side of town stilled her. The wind carried the call of reed pipes. River kelp wrapped around her, pulling her down. It would take her under until water filled her, and she did not breathe. Those voices whispered their assurances. Better you drown than touch him.

So she didn’t touch his cheek like she meant to. Didn’t follow the shape of his temple down to his jawline. She took a lock of his hair between her fingers. It felt slick as the barbs of a feather, smooth, ready for rain. He shut his eyes as though he felt it, like the blue-black of his hair was living, as full of blood and nerves as his skin.

His look toward her mouth was quick, like she might not notice if he was fast enough. Then he lifted his eyes back up to hers. Even in daylight, his irises made her think of wet earth.

“Sorry about your postcards,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “If it’s windy enough, maybe they’ll get where they’re going.”

She tilted her head enough to tell him she wanted it, but didn’t move so much that those voices could say she started it. He was close enough that she could have traced his lower lip with her tongue.

The sound of laughing came from the back of the house, and he broke away. He raised his head, looking past Lace out the truck window. He mumbled something that may or may not have been French, and got out on the driver’s side.

Lace glanced around the truck. The laughing wasn’t close enough to be at them. She jumped down from the cab and went after him.

Dax and a couple of the other Corbeau men clustered behind a trailer. Cluck joined them, his back to Lace. Even through his shirt, she could make out the tension in his shoulders.

Cluck shifted his weight, and Lace saw the thing in Dax’s hands. She stopped, and her feet skidded against the ground.

She knew those scraps of beaded fabric as well as her own body. The small stitches. The bursts of glass beads. Her old tail, the grapefruit pink now dulled to peach. The current must have pulled it loose from that ball of roots. The silt and river water had left it dirty, drying stiff.

Something deep red had splattered it. The color, close to new blood, pressed into Lace’s collarbone. Then she saw the jar of blackberry jam, dark as wine, in a cousin’s hands.

Dax holding her old tail made her feel his hands on her lower back, her hips, her thighs. Everywhere Cluck had touched cooled, leaving room for the pinch of Dax’s grip.

“What the hell are you doing?” Cluck asked.

“What does it look like?” Dax asked. “We’re gonna make a delivery.”

“Where did you get this?” Cluck grabbed the fin, balling it in his hands. The sense of his fingers on Lace’s ankle, while Dax still held the rest of her, almost made her kneel.

“It washed up,” said one of the cousins, flicking more of the blackberry jam over the fabric. “One of the fish must’ve lost it.” Red stained his fingers, and Dax’s. It stained all their hands.

Lace had made her peace with losing that tail to the river. The water would swallow it and keep it. Like a communion hostia, it would dissolve on the current’s tongue.

But now the Corbeaus had it.

If she saved it from their hands, they’d know, and she’d have to run. The feather burn would stay on her forever, this family’s hate searing it deeper into her skin.

If she did nothing, they would stain it, leave it outside the motel for Abuela or Martha or worse, her great-aunt, whose skilled, tired hands had worked so many nights to make it. Tía Lora would take it as a sign that Lace had died or would soon.

The one with the jar held it out to Cluck, offering him a turn.

Cluck stood close to his brother. “Stop.”

Dax laughed and splashed a little more blackberry jam on the tail. Lace felt it, sharp as cuts.

Cluck ripped the tail out of Dax’s hands. Flecks of red sprayed both their shirts.

The cousins froze. One stepped back.

Lace folded her tongue and bit down. The relief of her tail going from Dax’s hands to Cluck’s was so sharp it was almost pain.

“You really want to go over there and make this worse?” Cluck asked, his voice low enough that Lace could barely hear it, the words meant just for his brother. He shrugged his shoulder toward their cousins. “You want to see one of them die this year?”

A few Corbeau women came outside. Clémentine. Eugenie. A couple others Lace had done makeup on. One screamed at the sight of all the red, but one of the cousins rushed to show her the blackberry jam jar.

Dax thumbed a spot off his chin and stared his brother down. “You hate them as much as I do.”

“More.” Cluck tightened his grip on the fabric. “But we are not doing this.”

Dax glanced over his shoulder, sensing the women watching.

He looked back at Cluck. “You just used your one free pass.” He took a handful of the tail and shoved it at Cluck’s chest, staining his shirt worse.

Cluck balled the tail up in his hands and took it into the costume trailer.

Lace followed him.

He folded the tail like an antique dress or a lace tablecloth. “Sorry you had to see that.”

She shut the trailer door.

“We’re not crazy, just so you know,” he said, but didn’t look at her. “There are reasons we feel how we feel.”

Right then, she didn’t care what he thought of her family, what he would think of her if he knew her full name. She cared that her old tail wasn’t in Dax’s hands, on its way to Tía Lora.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He set it down on the counter. “If I throw it out here, Dax’ll find it. I could throw it out in town.” He ran his fingers over the beading, and Lace shivered. “But it just doesn’t seem right.”

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked a little sad, a half-frown creasing the corner of his mouth. “It’s just good work, that’s all.”

The sting of Dax’s hands faded, and the feeling of Cluck’s came back. Cluck may have hated the name Paloma, but he recognized the art in those stitches and beads. To him, seeing them stained and torn must have been a little like finding a pair of peacock-feather wings ripped apart.

Her last name may not have been safe on his tongue, but this fabric and these beads, this part of her the water had sealed to her body like skin, was safe in his hands.

“If I bring it to the other family, it’s gonna look like a threat,” he said.

“Then let me do it,” Lace said. “They don’t know who I am.” She could get it to Martha, who’d hide it in with the dresses Abuela didn’t like her wearing.

“No,” Cluck said. “I don’t want you anywhere near that family.”

That family. Her mouth grew hot with wanting to tell him whatever he thought he knew, whatever he thought about her family, he had heard wrong, been told wrong.

He was the one good one out of all these crows.

“I have an idea,” she said.

She brought him to the river, the ruined tail in her arms. This way it would be out of the Corbeaus’ hands, and her great-aunt would never see the stains.

She gathered handfuls of small stones, worn smooth by the current, and stuffed them through a hole in a fin seam. When enough stones weighted down the bottom edge of the fin, she gave it back to the water.

The dull pink sank and vanished. Quiet fell over her, the slow joy of finding the sun on a cold day. Those stones would hold her ruined tail at the river bottom.

The relief was so perfect it made her escamas sore. It bubbled up through her, spilling out of her, making her kiss Cluck’s cheek.

He ignored it, took it as the same kind of teasing as her shoving his arm. So she kissed him on the mouth to make him understand, lightly, just enough to feel the fine grain of his lips, a little chapped by dust and wind. He accepted it, not pulling away. But he didn’t deepen it. He didn’t take her tongue or give her his. He took it like she meant it. More than a greeting, less than it would have been in the cab of his grandfather’s truck.

When she pulled away, he did too.

He opened his eyes. “What was that for?”

“For what you did,” she said.

He squinted enough that his eyelashes almost met. “What do you care? This isn’t your fight.”

“It is my fight.” She said it without thinking. But it slipped into lies she’d already told, easily as her old tail sinking into the river. “This town’s too small for a war,” she said, like this town, not the war, belonged to her.

He watched the corner of the fin flick up and then go under. Then he started back toward the house.

A few steps away, he realized she wasn’t behind him, and looked over his shoulder. “You coming?”

She searched the river for a flush of peach, but the water had folded it into the dark.

They walked back to the old Craftsman. She went in with him, and the breath of the Paloma women followed. Those voces tried to tell her that him holding the door wasn’t a polite thing. He could turn himself into a crow with knives for feathers, and she wouldn’t see in time to run.

Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.

Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

Cluck held his hands under the kitchen tap, washing the blackberry off his fingers.

He watched Lace pat her hands dry on a dish towel.

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

The water jumped from warm to hot, prickling his fingers. “You getting ideas?”

She shoved him. “It’s stained. I can get those out.”

Cluck unbuttoned the cuffs. “I know how to wash a shirt.”

“Do you know how to get Almendro blackberry out? Because I do.” She cut open a lemon from the fruit bowl and found a half-flat bottle of soda water in the fridge. “My younger cousins always got this stuff on their good clothes.”

He unbuttoned the front, and slipped out of it.

She rubbed the lemon and soda water into the stains and ran them under the kitchen tap. The flecks faded and disappeared.

“Hey, that actually works,” Cluck said. “I thought I was gonna have to figure out what to wear with a pink shirt.”

“Why not just wear stuff you can throw in a washer?” she asked.

“My clothes used to be my grandfather’s,” he said. “I like wearing what he wore.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess it makes me feel like I could be like him.” He thought of the Alain Corbeau-ness flooding into him.

She scrubbed at a stain. Even watching her profile, he could see a little bit of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You doing okay here so far?” he asked.

“Yeah. They trust me to make them look good, believe it or not.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked.

She turned her head, and that smile turned sad and patient, bearing with the question.

She meant the burn on her cheek. Even his mother, piling loose powder on her like layers of une millefeuille, couldn’t make her forget it. That burn kept her from seeing how her hair was the deep brown of black mustard seeds, or that her eyelashes looked like the smallest feathers.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

Her lips parted a little. She looked as likely to tell him to go screw himself as she did to say thank you.

“You don’t have to say that,” she said.

He needed to shut up. The older Corbeaus always taught the younger ones how to talk to girls, but nobody had taught him. At eighteen, he was too old to be outright forbidden from talking to girls, but he was still le petit démon. His uncles’ glares whenever they saw him so much as ask a local girl for directions was enough to put him off trying altogether.

But he couldn’t let Lace think he was talking about some version of her from before the accident. She had the same face. It just had a bloom of red on it.

“I know I don’t have to say it,” he said. He stopped himself from saying the word “beautiful” again. “It’s just true.”

She stared at him. Her hands stayed still, holding his shirt. The wet fabric dripped into the metal sink.

He shouldn’t have said it at all. Saying it with his shirt off just made it worse. Why not unbutton his fly while he was at it?

He grabbed for something to change the subject to, but everything he landed on made it worse. The pattern on her dress. How the ends of her hair had gotten in the way, and were wet from the tap. Her hands working the fabric of his shirt in a way that made him wish he was still in it.

She wrung out his shirt and handed it to him. “Just hang it up. It should be good.” She put the club soda and the other half of the lemon in the fridge. The citrus smell made the air feel thin and clean.

He had to leave. Standing there with the wet shirt in his hands would make him look even more comme un con than he already felt.

You’re beautiful. It’s just true. His own words hovered in the air like dragonflies. Even when he went out the back door to hang up his shirt, he could hear the humming of their wings. He had no way of knowing if she wanted to swat them away or open her hands to let them land.

Pájaro viejo no entra en jaula.

An old bird is difficult to catch.

“Lace.”

Lace woke first to Clémentine’s voice, then to the pain in her arms.

“Lace.”

Clémentine held her hands, stopping her from clawing her own skin.

Lace sat up. She remembered the dream of that cotton-candy sky, how it fell, scalding everything.

“You’ve scratched yourself open,” Clémentine said.

A few dots of blood speckled Lace’s sleeves. Clémentine tried to roll them up, but Lace pulled her hands away.

“You should clean those.” Clémentine handed Lace the things she needed to shower.

Hot water still hurt. It drummed heat into Lace’s back, scratched at her cheek. It came on like the sting of touching dry ice. It made her brace her hands on the wall tile.

So she flipped the shower to cold and shivered under the tap. Beads of water clung to her body, icing her back and her breasts. The chill stayed, her lungs and heart cooling like fruit in the aguas frescas.

The sound of the water made her think of Cluck’s voice, him saying, “You’re beautiful” under the soft rush of the kitchen faucet. She wished, as hard as she wished for her skin to heal and close, that she’d been looking at him when he said it. His face would’ve told her what those words meant. If he felt sorry for her, or if wondering what might have happened in the front seat of the truck, absent his cousins’ laughter, bothered him as much as it bothered her.

A shudder rattled through her as she dried off and pulled on her clothes. Dresses only, as long as she was here. No more skirts and tops. If her shirt rode up in the back, her escamas might show.

She did her makeup the way Nicole taught her. A thin layer, then another. Then blush, lip color. Her hair soaked the back of her dress, sticking it to her skin. She balled it up to pin it on her way down the hall.

The sound of coughing startled her. Her hands opened, and whips of her wet hair hit her back.

She followed the sound farther into the hall. It had the deep, hollow echo of a hard cough. She could hear it starting and ending in the lungs, pinching the heart and pressing against the rib cage.

Lace found the room the coughing came from. The wooden door was cracked, letting her see the old man standing among the mismatched furniture. A plain bed and a dresser with vine-shaped carvings along the edges. Yellowing doilies on everything. A wooden bead rosary dripped off the nightstand.

He held a white handkerchief to his mouth, the cough shaking his body.

Lace had exchanged few words with Cluck’s grandfather. The night she’d started with the show, Eugenie had introduced her to Alain Corbeau, who’d made a “Hmm” sound that was not quite a greeting but not quite disapproval either.

The strings of globe lights hadn’t shown how much Cluck took after him. But now, with daylight filling this room, she would’ve bet her new tail that Cluck would look just like him in fifty years. They both had the same tint to their forearms, brown, but not like Lace’s family. That brown had the gray thread of an ashwood tree, more silver than olive.

Both had that same dark hair too, worn a little long. Gray streaks lightened the old man’s, but he still had plenty of black left.

The old man lowered the handkerchief from his mouth. The linen came away blood-speckled, like the flecks of brown on a robin’s egg.

The difference between Cluck and the old man was more than age. It was the way, when the old man realized Lace was there, his eyes caught the light a little more sharply.

“Are you okay?” Lace asked.

“This is the last time I let my daughter give me one of her sleeping pills,” he said. “This morning I was so foggy I tried to brush my teeth with my razor.” He forced a smile. It started out kind, then twisted, wry and wary, when Lace didn’t return it.

Mixing up his razor and his toothbrush. It was so strange she almost believed it. But he’d made a little too much of a point of showing the blood-dotted handkerchief while he said it. For how unimportant she was, he cared a little too much about her taking his explanation as truth.

“And you?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

“I do the makeup now,” she said.

“I know what you do. Why are you doing it here?”

His eyes drifted toward the feather burn on her arm. She’d covered it the same way Nicole Corbeau had taught her to do her face, layers of foundation and powder as thin as the dried husks of tomatillos.

To anyone except Lace, it wasn’t there. But the old man studied the patch on her arm like he could see it.

He knew.

He met her eyes. She read the bargain in his face, the offer, an exchange of silences. Don’t tell, and I won’t tell.

She shut the door and pressed her back to the hallway wall. The sound of his coughing stabbed into her forehead. Maybe this man was the Corbeaus’ version of her father, skeptical of las supersticiones. As long as she didn’t make trouble for him, he’d let her stay.

If she told, she’d lose any chance of getting the scar lifted, along with this small, feathered thing growing between her and the boy called Cluck.

But the sound of the kitchen faucet came back to her, this time with the things Cluck had said about his clothes. They’d belonged to this man, coughing a mist of blood into his handkerchief. This man Cluck wanted to be like so badly he wore collared shirts in the heat of a Central Valley summer, hoping the invisible things that made his grandfather who he was would rub off like a scent.

If Cluck could lose him, he needed to know.

Lace heard Cluck’s voice upstairs. She stood in the front of the wooden staircase and looked up at the second floor. She could’ve called his name, but then Cluck’s grandfather would hear her. He could tell her secret in a few words. The Corbeaus would trap her in this house, and she’d never have the chance to tell Cluck that his grandfather had a secret of his own.

She took a breath in and ran up the stairs, quick as las sirenas slid into a cold river.

The second floor barely looked different from the first. A few closed doors. A few open. An unscreened window at the end of the hall. But even with the hardwood under her feet, she felt the distance to the ground. The third and fourth floors of motels had never bothered her, but here, she was sure a coin tossed out a window would fall forever. This house may not have belonged to the Corbeaus, but by renting and staying in it they’d filled it with their reckless love of heights. They made their living by not fearing falling.

Cluck stood at the end of the hall, talking to another Corbeau about lights and cables. She took a few steps down the hall as fast as she’d taken the stairs and put her palm to Cluck’s shoulder blade.

He turned around. “What’s wrong?” His eyes flashed over her face.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered.

Cluck said something in French, and the other man nodded and left.

“What happened?” Cluck asked.

She dragged the words off her tongue. The coughing. The blood. The handkerchief.

Cluck did not flinch. He got on the phone and didn’t put it down until he found a doctor three towns over who could take a last-minute appointment.

“How do you know he’ll go?” Lace asked.

“I’ll tell him the appointment’s for me,” Cluck said. “I’ll say I want the company.”

That bought Lace time. Cluck’s grandfather wouldn’t know she’d told, not for sure, until they got to the doctor’s office. That gave her a chance to run.

“What if he doesn’t believe you?” Lace asked.

“He will.” Cluck’s eyes ticked toward his hands, scarred from pulling at the cotton of her dress. “I can’t believe this. How many years working at the plant? And he acts like all those chemicals are just dye and water.”

The floor wavered under Lace. “Your grandfather worked at the plant?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Cluck said. “For most of his career.”

Lace didn’t know any of the Corbeaus had done anything outside of this show.

Cluck pulled on a blazer, soft with half a century of wear. “You know where the thread is. If someone tears a dress, you think you can handle it?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d do everything they expected tonight, painting all their faces. If she left them, took off without doing her job, it would be one more wrong against Cluck. One more stolen Camargue horse. She might wake up with a feather on her other arm, her back, her neck.

But once the show started, she’d run.

Cluck set a hand on her upper arm. “I’m glad you told me.”

She nodded, bit the inside of her cheek, kept her face from telling him that when he came back, she’d be gone.

Celui qui veut être jeune quand il est vieux, doit être vieux quand il est jeune.

He who wants to be young when he is old, must be old when he is young.

Pépère barely acknowledged the nurse who took his pulse and blood pressure. When she told him the doctor would be right in, he looked out the window like he was waiting for a bus.

The nurse flashed Cluck and his grandfather a smile, bright as the flowers on her scrubs, and shut the door behind her.

Pépère nodded at her, his mouth in the same pinched smile he gave children. Cluck knew that look. His grandfather gave it to Dax and to Cluck’s cousins when they were small. How Cluck escaped it, he didn’t know. Probably because his hand bothered the rest of them so much they didn’t want to be near him. Pépère took their disdain as a recommendation.

“I don’t like that gadji,” Pépère said.

Cluck leaned against the sink and flipped through an old copy of Popular Mechanics. “The nurse?”

“Your new makeup girl.”

“You don’t like her for telling me about the blood on your mouchoir.”

“You let her follow you around like she is your little sister.”

Cluck cringed. Yes, that was exactly how he wanted to think of Lace.

“I understand,” his grandfather said. “You saved her life. She has nowhere to go. You want to care for her like she is some stray cat.”

Cluck turned the page. “So which is it, Pépère, is she my sister or my cat?”

The doctor came in, asked Pépère a few more questions, told him, “You should stop smoking.”

“I’ve told him that my whole life,” Cluck said. A waitress from Calais had gotten Pépère started on cigarettes before he left le Midi for the United States.

“Yes, it is the smoking.” Pépère stood and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for your help, Doctor.” His way of ending an appointment he hadn’t wanted. Feign repentance of his half-century cigarette habit, and be on his way. This was why Cluck’s mother didn’t drag him to doctors anymore.

Cluck hadn’t even told his grandfather the appointment was for him until they’d parked and gone in. He’d said he was going in to see someone about his hands, still spotted the pinks and reds of worn brick. Only Pépère’s pity had kept him from suspecting on the drive over.

Like Cluck cared what his hands looked like, as long as they worked enough to make the wings. His guilt felt like an elbow jabbing his ribs. But if he hadn’t lied, Pépère never would have come.

The doctor scrawled on a prescription pad. Wrinkles softened the skin around his mouth. His hair had more gray than Pépère’s. Pépère must have been hoping for a resident. They were always pleased thinking they’d converted a smoker. Easier to con.

“I’m writing you a script.” The doctor tore off the sheet and held it out to Pépère. “For antibiotics. The way you’ve weakened your lungs, they can’t fight off infection the way we’d like.”

Pépère wouldn’t take the prescription. He pretended not to see the paper flapping in the man’s hand.

Cluck reached over for it. “Thank you.”

The doctor left.

“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Cluck told his grandfather.

Pépère rolled down his shirtsleeves. “Where are you going?”

“To apologize for you.” Cluck followed the doctor into the hallway. “Do you have a minute?”

The doctor looked up from a chart.

Cluck checked the hallway, in case his words might bring out a risk manager. “What about the accident? Could that have anything to do with it?”

The doctor hesitated, his mouth half-open.

“Please,” Cluck said. “I just want to know.”

The doctor lowered his voice. “With what the smoking’s already done to his lungs, and now with everything that might or might not be floating around in the air…”

“Might or might not?” Cluck asked.

“They won’t tell us anything. We know there was some kind of ECA or MCA, but we don’t know what else. They’re calling it ‘trade secrets.’ That means there’s only so much we can do.”

Cluck’s eyes stuck on the hallway carpet.

“But it means the same thing,” the doctor said. “He’s probably a lot more open to infection than he would be.”

Cluck folded the prescription paper. “So get him to take the pills?” he asked.

The doctor nodded. “Get him to take the pills.”

Bonne chance; il en aurait besoin. Cluck would have to crush them up and ask Clémentine to slip them into his food.

De la vista, nace el amor.

From what you see, you love.

Cluck had told Lace that he and his grandfather wouldn’t be back until late. But now she heard the Morris Cowley’s tires crunching the leaves, an hour earlier than she’d expected.

The truck parked outside. Alain Corbeau would have told Cluck by now. They would come for her.

She got the trailer’s back window open, ready to climb out into the dark, a borrowed kitchen knife in her hand. But Cluck and the old man’s steps led away from the trailers. Away from the yellow Shasta.

If she wasn’t gone by the time they came back, they’d kill her. The Paloma among the Corbeaus. When she was little she had nightmares about them all turning to crows, the spears of their beaks poking a thousand holes in her.

She pressed her suitcase shut.

The door flew open, and Eugenie stumbled in.

Lace’s ribs felt sharp, jabbing at her lungs. She backed toward the trailer wall, gripping the suitcase and the kitchen knife. She could knock Eugenie down with one swing of that suitcase. Anyone else she’d wave the knife at.

Clémentine appeared in the doorway, still in a show dress like Eugenie. Only their wings were off. Wouldn’t they want them on to kill her? Wouldn’t they want the last thing she saw to be the cover of those enormous wings?

“What are you doing?” Clémentine asked.

They hadn’t turned to crows. No black feathers sprouted from their arms. They looked at her not like they planned to kill her and scavenge her body, but like they’d caught her undressing.

They didn’t know. The old man hadn’t told him.

“I think I broke the lock,” Lace said. “I’m trying to get it open.”

“With a steak knife? You’ll kill yourself.” Clémentine pulled a pin from her hair. “Here.”

Lace set the suitcase down and pretended to fiddle with the lock.

“What’s the matter?” Eugenie asked.

Lace turned the suitcase so they couldn’t see the lock, and kept moving the hairpin. Her heart felt squeezed tight, giving off blood like juice from a plum. Maybe the old man had told only Cluck, and would leave her to him.

“I shouldn’t have said anything about Alain,” Lace said.

Clémentine sat on the built-in bed. “Alain Corbeau’s an old mule. If he felt a heart attack coming on, he’d say he was too busy, could it come back next week.”

Lace jerked the hairpin like it had done the trick. “Thank you.” She handed it back to Clémentine.

Eugenie hopped up on a counter. “If it makes you feel better, he’s angrier with Cluck than he is with you.”

Lace dropped her shoulders, the tension swimming down her back. Maybe Alain Corbeau hadn’t told Cluck. But his stare told her it was not her place to interfere. Entre dos muelas cordales nunca pongas tus pulgares, her uncles would say. Don’t put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth.

The old man’s face would never tell her anything. She wanted to look at Cluck and find out what he knew.

“Where’s Cluck?” Lace asked.

“He’s at his tree,” Eugenie said.

“His tree?”

Clémentine swiped a cotton pad over her face, rubbing off her eye makeup. “Every place we stop, he has his tree.”

Eugenie gave Lace vague directions to the cottonwood. But Lace did not go there first. She found Cluck’s grandfather leaning against the Morris Cowley, a half-burned-down cigarette between his fingers.

He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m trying to quit.”

He hummed a quick laugh and put the pack away.

She wanted to ask why he hadn’t told Cluck who she was, but bit back the question in case she’d been wrong. If Alain Corbeau hadn’t recognized the Paloma in her, hadn’t seen the feather on her arm, she wasn’t telling.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But Cluck had to know.”

“It made the boy feel better,” the old man said. “And it was nothing to me. Doctors are les crétins. They can’t make me do what I don’t care to.”

The end of his cigarette glowed against the dark, a flake off a harvest moon.

Lace tried not to touch the burn on her cheek. “You used to work at the plant?” she asked.

“Years ago.” He put out his cigarette and went inside.

Lace followed the clean, honey scent of wild roses through the trees. It drifted over the old campground, heavier and sweeter at night, like gardenia.

She spotted the white of Cluck’s shirt and the pale soles of his bare feet, moon-brightened. In the dark, they were all of him that stood out. The black of his hair, his dark trousers, the light brown of his face and hands faded into the tree.

“Well.” He saw her and climbed down, hands and feet gripping the branches. “If it isn’t the only person my grandfather likes less than me right now.”

“That’s not how Eugenie tells it,” she said.

Cluck got down from the lowest bough. “She’s probably right.” He gave her a worn-out smile.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just angry.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t take care of himself. Never has.”

She set her hand on the trunk and looked up. “How do you climb without shoes?”

“I’m not sure I could climb with shoes. I’ve been doing it without since I was five.”

“What do you do up that high?”

“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.”

“Very funny.”

She set her hands and feet where he told her to, pulling herself up. He went with her, following after on some branches, going ahead of her on others to help her up.

Her arms liked the work. They’d missed fighting the river’s current. Now they snapped awake.

The wind raked the branches, and she laughed at the leaves brushing her hair.

“See,” Cluck said. A branch blew between them, and he held it aside. “You’re a natural.”

“I’m up here,” she said. “Now what’s your real name?”

“It’s Luc,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What’s so embarrassing about that?”

“I never said I had an embarrassing name. I just like people calling me Cluck.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because my brother hates it.”

“That’s mature.”

He picked a leaf out of her hair. “My mother likes him better.”

“You don’t know that.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I do.”

She pulled a scrap of twig off his shirt collar.

“I gotta hand it to my mother though,” he said. “None of that ‘I love my kids the same’ stuff. I appreciate the honesty. It’s refreshing.”

“Nobody loves their children the same.” Abuela had always liked Lace’s mother best. She had the spirit and spine to tell Abuela off, but not the nerve to go against her. Justin, Oscar, and Rey’s mother loved Justin a little more, because he had realized, before he had words for it, that his place as the oldest brother would have to spread and grow to fill the space their father left. If Lace had brothers or sisters, she was sure she’d be her father’s favorite, and sure she wouldn’t be her mother’s.

A black, red-streaked feather settled between Cluck’s neck and shirt collar. He didn’t seem to feel it. Maybe he’d gotten so used to the downy barbs against the back of his neck, he didn’t notice them any more than Lace did her own stray hairs.

She picked the feather out. Her fingers grazed his neck, and he shivered.

“Why do you do that?” he asked.

“What?”

“Save those things.”

“Do you want me not to?” she asked.

“I just want to know why.”

She held it up to the sky. The moon brightened the red. “I like them.”

“You’re alone there.”

She slipped it into the pocket of her jean jacket. She felt it through the fabric, hot against her rib cage. One more feather for the collection in her suitcase.

The wind brushed another one from his hair. It swirled down, settling on a lower bough. She climbed down after it, from one branch onto the one under it.

She let go of the higher branch, and her right foot slipped. Then the dark looked like she’d imagined, the same as the deepest lakes on bright days, the light reaching down and then vanishing.

Cluck’s arm hit the small of her back. His hand gripped her side, and her escamas glowed like a fever. “Put a little of your weight down before you put all of it down.” He held her up, tight enough that the feather in her pocket burned into her. “Shift too fast, and that’s what makes you feel like you’re falling. If you think you’re falling, it’s more likely you will.”

His mouth almost brushed hers. The way he held her made her stand on her toes, sharpening the feeling that the ground underneath them was the same endless depth as those lakes.

He didn’t stop her pressing her fingers into him. She didn’t stop him when he took her top lip between his. Her hand found the feathers under his hair, soft and thick as river grass, and she kissed him back. She opened her mouth to his and pretended the sky was water.

Quien no tiene, perder no puede.

He who has nothing, loses nothing.

When Lace passed Cluck in the hallway the next morning, he nodded in greeting but didn’t make eye contact. The minute he walked into the kitchen that afternoon, Lace left, Eugenie in midsentence. They did that until call time, him not looking at her, her leaving any space he entered, and she took it as a shared understanding that what happened last night would stay in the trees.

Then the sun turned from gold to copper, the slight change in light that came just before it went down. If how he kissed her was something that had to stay in those branches, she wanted to know if it also had to stay in the night before. Or, if tonight, once the show was done and the sky was dark, they’d do it again.

She made up an excuse to stop by the blue and white Shasta, something about costumes.

She forgot it as soon as she shut the trailer door behind her.

Cluck’s dress shirt had been flung onto the built-in bed, and he worked in his undershirt.

He saw her and set down a wire cutter.

The feeling of his mouth still glowed hot on hers from the night before.

He put his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. Odd, considering how much she knew he had to do and how little time they had before the show. Then his eyes flicked down, and she realized his hands might have been in his pockets because he wasn’t sure whether to put them on her.

She caught his eyes as he looked back up, and held them. He took one step toward her. He didn’t take another one, but it was enough to tell her he was in if she was.

She kissed him as hard as when they were in the cottonwood. He held her waist, felt her body through her clothes. She held him against the trailer wall, and he shoved the empty wire frame of a pair of wings out of the way. It rattled against an age-spotted mirror.

He slid a hand under her shirt and onto the small of her back, his palm half on her bare skin, half on the waistband of her skirt. A skirt she thought she would not wear as long as she was among the Corbeaus. His fingers pressed against her escamas. As long as he didn’t look, he wouldn’t see the birthmarks. The texture of her healing body would hide them.

It hurt, his hands on her burns. It stung like a hot shower, pins of water and steam stabbing in. She was ready for it. The sting reminded her she was a body knitting itself back together. It was why she liked his hands on her. His wrecked fingers knew how to handle something ruined.

He kissed her like her lips were not chapped and scarring. Ran his tongue over the curve of her lower lip like it was soft. Like the rose and lemon oil she spread on her mouth at night made a difference. Maybe he did not feel it because his were just as rough. He and Lace were sewn of similar fabric, the raw edges of their families’ cloth.

Her mouth left a smudge of lipstick on his. She rubbed it away. He closed his eyes and held her hand there, kissed her thumb and took it lightly between his teeth, holding onto it. It trembled the veins that held her heart, that feeling of his teeth on her thumb pad and fingernail.

The feather on her forearm flared with heat.

She kissed him so hard he kept his breath still on his tongue. He left the taste of black salt on her mouth. The woody flavor of charcoal. The sugar and acid of citrus peel. The soft metal of iron.

A knock rattled the trailer latch.

“Cluck?” said Eugenie.

Lace ducked down behind a counter.

“What are you doing?” Cluck asked.

“She’s gonna wonder why I’m in here.”

“She’s gonna wonder why you’re on the floor. Just say you’re helping me fix something.” He opened the door.

Lace stayed down.

Eugenie handed him a few rolls of satin ribbon. “Closest match I could get.”

Cluck held the tail of one against another spool of ribbon. “Good enough.”

Eugenie’s eyes wandered over to the counter, her feet following. She stood over Lace, hands on her hips. She already had on a dusk-blue dress, but Lace hadn’t done her face yet.

“I lost a needle,” Lace said.

Eugenie shrugged and left her to it.

Lace tried to follow her out. Cluck shut the door behind Eugenie and held his arm to the small of Lace’s back, the same as he had in the tree last night.

He wore his loneliness like his scar. Most of the time his sleeves covered it, but when she cuffed them back, he couldn’t hide it. She wanted to tell him she was not afraid of what he was, this red-streaked thing in all the pure, perfect black. But the words dissolved between their lips like ice crystals.

She pulled her mouth off his. “I still have to put makeup on half of them.”

“You’re fast.”

“Later,” she said.

She stepped down from the trailer and left Cluck to the wings, the taste of violet-black salt still under her tongue. She made up the last of the performers, and the Corbeaus drained toward the woods like sand through fingers. Lace put away the powders and colors, cleaned the brushes, swept the flour off the wood.

A small shadow broke the light. Lace turned her head. A girl no older than five or six stood near the vanity. She had hair dark and coarse as Cluck’s, but eyes pale as dishwater.

She sipped from a plastic cup. “Will you do me next?” she asked.

Next? Who was ahead of her? The performers had gone, and no one was out here. Cluck’s grandfather was inside. Yvette had Eugenie’s younger brothers and the rest of the children in the house, cutting construction paper with craft scissors. Georgette, thanks to a heavy dose of cough syrup, was sleeping off a cold. “She chooses now to be sick,” Nicole Corbeau had said.

Lace pulled out a chair. “Bien sûr,” she said, one of two or three French phrases she’d picked up.

The girl set her cup down and closed her eyes, letting Lace give her a dusting of powder. She swung her legs, her shoes brushing Lace’s skirt. “When I’m in the show I’m going to wear a purple dress, like Violette’s.”

That told Lace what color eye shadow to use. She washed on the lightest tint of lavender.

The girl reached out for her cup, eyes still squeezed shut. Before Lace could help her get it, the girl’s small hand knocked it over. Grape juice splashed across the desk and onto Lace’s skirt and top.

The girl’s eyes snapped open. She took in the mess, and her face scrunched up. Lace knew that look from her younger cousins. It meant she had about five seconds until the wailing started.

“It’s okay.” Lace mopped up the spill. “I’ve done it a hundred times.”

The sugar soaked through Lace’s skirt, stinging the burns on her thighs.

“In fact,” Lace whispered. “How about we don’t tell anyone? I spill stuff so much, if we tell, they’ll think I did it, and I’ll get in trouble. So we won’t tell, okay?”

The girl nodded, a smile showing her baby teeth.

Lace breathed out, her shoulders relaxing. The last thing she needed was Yvette and the girl’s mother wondering what she’d done to make her cry.

She blotted the juice from her skirt, but the sugar still stung. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

The little girl nodded.

Lace went to get a clean dress from her suitcase.

The sound of arundo reed pipes echoed through the yellow trailer. They reached out from the other side of the woods like fingers. She wondered if the girl had heard them. She wouldn’t have known what they were. But they might have sounded enough like the cry of far-off wolves to startle her into tipping over the cup.

Lace peeled off the blouse and skirt, and splashed water over the stains. Happy? she wanted to call back to the arundo sounds. They’d quieted now that she was out of her skirt and top, her foolish choice. She’d put on a dress that would hide her escamas.

The trailer latch clicked, and the door opened.

She couldn’t grab her dress fast enough.

Cluck stood in the doorway. His eyes found her lower back, where the arc of white birthmarks crossed her skin. No paillettes hid her escamas now. She felt them glow under his stare.

He stepped down from the trailer. “Go inside, okay, Jacqueline?” Lace heard him tell the little girl.

The little girl skipped inside. The house’s back door fell shut behind her.

Lace pulled on her dress and followed Cluck into the trees.

“Son of a bitch.” He let out a curt laugh. “When you said you did a lot of swimming, you meant it.”

She buttoned her dress, trotting to keep up with him. “Cluck.”

He stopped. “Did your family send you?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you here to sabotage us? Or just to spy?”

“My family doesn’t know where I am.”

“Right.” He kept walking.

She got in front of him. “It’s your fault I’m here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This.” She held her forearm to his face, letting him see the garnet-colored scar. “You did this to me. You put this on me, and now my family doesn’t want me.”

“I didn’t do that to you. The plant did that to you.”

She blocked his way. “It’s because of your feathers.”

“They’re part of my hair. They can’t do anything to you.”

He knew. He had to know.

“If you thought I did this to you, why were you keeping my feathers?” he asked.

“I thought it would give me something on you,” she said.

“Something on me,” he said. “So when you came here, it was to try to get me to fix that.” Not a question.

He looked at her, and the truth sank through her, a stone through a river. He’d thought she’d come here because she wanted him.

The night she first came here, she was so quick to hold down thinking of him that way. Now something ticked inside her, an urgency to tell him that yes, she came here about the scar, but she had already wanted him that night. She should’ve come here for no reason other than that she wanted him.

If she’d known how his hands would feel as they spread over her body, or how his mouth tasted like black salt, or that he was beautiful in ways that made him ugly to his family, she would have. She would’ve left the hospital still in her blue gown and gone looking for him.

But she could see the last few days crossing his face. The two of them scrambling over each other in the front seat of his grandfather’s truck. Her fingers catching in the feathers under his hair. Him holding her in the high branches, and her letting him, giving him her body so completely that she would’ve fallen if he’d let go.

“Cluck,” she said.

“This was all because you thought I could take that off you?” he asked. “Wow, you really know how to commit, don’t you?”

The place where his hands had slid over the small of her back went cold. Now he thought she’d kissed him, cupped each of his red-striped feathers in her palms, for no other reason than that she wanted the mark off her arm.

“Luc,” she said, calling him his real name without thinking, some wild grasp at getting to him.

All he gave her back was a hurt smile that said he thought it was cheap for her to try it, and almost funny that she thought it would work.

“You and your family,” he said. “You really think I have nothing better to do than curse you? What kind of old wives’ tales do you all tell each other?”

“Our old wives’ tales? You’re one to talk. You won’t even admit you’re left-handed.”

“I’m not.” He almost yelled it.

She picked up a pinecone and threw it at him. He caught it with his left hand, his thumb and index finger gripping the scales.

He hurled it at the ground.

“If you don’t believe me,” Lace said, “ask my family why I’m not with them.”

He gave that same dry laugh. “Sure. Why don’t I just stop by? I’ll bring a salad.”

“They don’t know who you are,” she said. “My cousins sure didn’t.”

“Your cousins?” Then it registered. “The guys at the liquor store. Those were your cousins.”

“You really think I’m here to spy? Go ask my family where the pink mermaid went. They’ll tell you I’m not with them anymore. Or they’ll pretend I’m dead, or I never existed, I don’t know. Go ask them.”

Water glinted at the inner corners of his eyes. His jaw grew hard, eyes stuck on the pinecone. “I think I know enough, thanks.”

He took a step away from her.

“Cluck.” She reached out and clasped the curved-under fingers on his left hand.

“Don’t.” He pulled his hand away, not rough but decisive. Final.

Her guilt over hurting him drained away, and the empty place filled up with anger. He took every time their lips brushed, her body up against his, and threw it all out like scraps of ribbon.

“I don’t want to see you around here again,” he said.

“Or what?” Lace asked. “You’ll get the shotgun and take care of me?”

“No. That’s your family, remember?”

The burn on her forearm pulsed. He’d seen the dead crows. He knew about her uncles with the Winchester. She dug her nails into her palms, thinking of Cluck finding one of those birds, eyes dull as black beach glass.

“At least we’ve never killed anyone in your family,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Twenty years ago.”

“You’re kidding, right? Why would my family sink the trees they were performing in?”

“I’m guessing they didn’t mean to, and whatever they meant to do went wrong.”

“Like what?”

“Like drown everyone in our show,” she said. “The flooding at the lake messed up our part of the river. It was calm, and then halfway through the show it was white water. It could’ve killed half my family.”

“And the next time my family turned around, all of you had taken over the lakefront. You perform where a member of my family died. And a member of yours. You perform in your own family’s graveyard. You get that, right?”

“There wouldn’t be a graveyard if it weren’t for all of you. You killed my great-aunt’s husband. Did you know that?”

“Did you ever think your great-aunt’s husband was the one who did it?” Cluck asked. “What other reason did he have for being there?”

“The same reason your brother knew exactly what our tails looked like. He spied on us. Just like my great-uncle spied on all of you.”

Cluck dropped his hands. “I’m so glad you have it all figured out.”

Sadness crept back into his face. The feeling of wanting to kiss him struck her, hard and sudden. To show him that her touching him had been in defiance of her own family, and she had not cared. To slip back into the rhythm of her mouth and fingers responding to his.

She was hollow with the knowledge that if she had any other last name, he would’ve let her.

“For the record,” Cluck said. “Every burn you have, you can thank your family.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“My grandfather worked for the plant until your family got him fired,” he said. “If he’d been there, this wouldn’t have happened. He would’ve pushed for the damn overfill pipe. That was his job. To keep things like that from happening. You want to blame someone for that scar, blame your family. Because they did this to you before you were born.”

“My family’s not the one who put the net in the river,” she said.

One slow blink, and the anger in his face fell away. “What?”

Lace thought of Magdalena, fighting the nylon net, and Lace fighting one of her own, a string of their last air bubbles floating across the eight years between their half-drownings.

“The night you found me,” Lace said. “I’d gotten caught in a net. If I hadn’t, I would’ve gotten out of the water a lot faster. I could’ve gotten home.”

“How do you know it was a net?” he asked.

“Last time I checked, blue nylon doesn’t grow in rivers.”

His eyes went over the ground, like he was looking for those bright threads among the leaves.

“But don’t take my word for it,” she said. “We’re all liars anyway, right?”

The corners of his eyes tensed, the anger coming back.

When he left she didn’t follow him. The feather burn vibrated on her forearm, searing into her, claiming its place on her skin.

Qui se fait brebis le loup le mange.

He who makes himself a ewe, the wolf eats.

He got out all the white peacock feathers. The ones he’d hidden in trunks, under the mattress, under the false bottom of a wooden drawer. He’d burn them all. They’d be nothing but ash. The next time he went to Elida Park, he’d leave the leucistic peacock’s eyespots where they fell.

Nothing settled. Nothing stayed still.

He’d brought a Paloma into his family. He’d let her sleep in the same trailer with Clémentine. He’d held her body against his, her mouth on his.

And he couldn’t count on Dax doing what their mother said. Sure, Dax never listened to Cluck, not nine years ago, and not now, but he listened to their mother.

Just not this time. The Palomas coating the branches with Vaseline, Camille’s fall. These were reasons Dax must have felt justified giving some younger cousins the go-ahead to set another one of those nets. They wouldn’t have gone after the Palomas without Dax’s blessing. Dax would have told them something about how he couldn’t give permission for that, not anymore, and it was too bad he couldn’t. They would’ve known what that meant. Do it. Do it and don’t get caught, because if you get caught, I’ll deny you ever brought this to me.

How stupid did Lace have to be? Hadn’t she seen what his cousins wanted to do with the mermaid tail? If she was smart, she’d run. Not just back to her side of Almendro. Farther. He didn’t want his cousins finding out and getting at her. If they hurt her, it would just make things worse with the Palomas. The fighting would take anyone who got in the way. If Clémentine or Eugenie or her younger brothers got hurt, the guilt would dig through him, wear a hole in him.

He didn’t want Lace Paloma dead.

He just wanted her gone.

The scent of her clung to him. The smell of citrus peel. The perfume of roses growing fast as weeds, their brambles twisting around new tree roots. That perfume had seeped into him, and he felt the thorns snagging.

Dax threw the trailer door open. It banged against the siding.

“I can’t believe you did this.” Dax slammed the door shut. “Paul or Bertrand, sure. But you? I taught you better than this.”

Cluck put a few feathers down. “What?”

“You and that girl.” He shoved Cluck against the counter.

The edge hit Cluck’s lower back.

“Everyone in the house heard you arguing,” Dax said.

The pain echoed up Cluck’s spine. He should’ve been careful. If he’d wanted to have it out with Lace Paloma, he should’ve gone deeper into the woods. Now they all knew. Dax knew. Cluck had hired a Paloma. And if they let him live, it’d be no less of a miracle than if Sara-la-Kali had appeared to him. His Romani blood meant she should protect him, but he was the last Corbeau a saint would ever show herself to.

Maybe they’d throw him to the water spirits who combed their fingers through the river’s depths. Maybe they’d decide that if Sara-la-Kali didn’t save him, he deserved to die.

Dax’s face reddened even through his stage makeup. “We have what, five women here who aren’t related to you? You managed to keep your hands off four of them, so what happened with her?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Cluck said.

“What, you’re gonna lie to me now? Tell me you’re just friends?” Dax grabbed his shirt collar. “Friends don’t fight like that.”

The weeds growing in Cluck’s rib cage let him take a breath. Maybe Yvette had seen them yelling, but she might not have caught what they were saying.

This was about him and Lace arguing the way a boyfriend and a girlfriend did.

“I thought you cared about this family,” Dax said.

“I do.”

“Then why did you do it?” Dax threw him down.

Cluck hit his lip as he fell. The Formica split it open, and blood trailed to his chin, hot as honey.

He slumped against the wall, holding his temples. He could have fought back, but didn’t. It always made it worse. Fighting back turned one bruise to four.

“You think we have rules for the hell of it?” Dax asked. “This, this kind of stuff is why we don’t date anyone who works for us. Because we don’t need anyone getting into some little prise de bec when we’re trying to run a show.”

Relief settled into Cluck’s chest. Dax didn’t know anything. He wouldn’t go after Lace. He’d smack Cluck around a little more and consider his point made. Clémentine and Eugenie and this family’s children would stay as safe as they could be.

“You slept with her, didn’t you?” Dax’s voice vibrated through the trailer.

Cluck wiped at the blood on his lip. Right thumb. Around Dax, he’d gotten used to using only his right hand. “That’s what you think?”

Dax crouched down and grabbed his hand. The blood seeped into Cluck’s thumbprint.

Just stay still. It was all Cluck had to do, and it’d be over. Dax would get bored with him, and leave.

“Why her?” Dax asked. “You could have gone after some girl in town. Why did you have to go after one who works for us?”

Some girl in town. Cluck knew what that meant. In each town where they stopped, he overheard his mother and her sisters make fun of girls with silly, hopeful smiles and too-short jean skirts. “She looks like a nice one,” his aunts would say. “You could give le cygnon to her.” His mother didn’t even bother checking if he was in earshot.

It was half-joking, half-planning. One day he’d be too old not to talk to girls, and when he was, his mother, no doubt with Dax’s help, would steer him toward one who would treat him like a thing to be tamed, controlled, contained. His family wanted him with a woman who would pet him and keep him from biting anyone. A girl with a drawer full of pink lipstick and a heart for some blue-eyed local who hadn’t liked her back. She’d get as bored with Cluck as Cluck would get with her.

Lace hadn’t bored him or gotten bored.

Dax jerked Cluck’s right hand. “Why her?”

Because it was hard to make her laugh, and hard to scare her.

“Why do you hate us?” Dax asked, sadness pulling at the corners of his eyes. Pity that Cluck had been born the thing he was. Frustration that he hadn’t fixed Cluck. “Why do you hate this family?”

“I don’t,” Cluck said.

Dax held Cluck’s hand open.

Cluck tried to pull it away. “Don’t do this.”

Dax held onto it.

This couldn’t happen again. As far as Dax knew, he’d broken him like a colt, made him right-handed. What else did he want?

Where’s the net, cygnon? The question from nine years ago knocked around in Cluck’s head. The nickname Dax tried to make stick.

Nine years ago Cluck had found a net hidden under his brother’s bed, bright blue nylon. His cousins had been leaving rope nets in the lake and river for years, and the Palomas always found them. But in the water, the nylon would be invisible. A mermaid could get caught in it, and drown.

It may have been the Palomas, but it was still killing. So Cluck took it, hid it. As soon as Dax found it gone, he knew. He threw Cluck into a wall to try to get him to say where he’d put it.

What did you do with the net, cygnon?

Cluck wouldn’t tell. He wasn’t letting there be blood on his family’s hands. The next blood drawn might be Eugenie’s, or his grandfather’s, or his younger cousins’.

But Dax had caught him fidgeting with a loose button, passing it between his left fingers. What are you doing using this hand? You’re supposed to use your right, crétin.

Now Dax spread out Cluck’s right fingers. “Which one did you touch her with?”

“I didn’t,” Cluck said.

Dax pinched his third finger. “This one?”

Cluck looked away and didn’t answer.

Dax grabbed a needle and shoved it into Cluck’s right hand. Without thinking, Cluck gripped it with his thumb, index, and third finger.

His older brother was nothing if not practical. Even nine years ago, he didn’t go for the fingers Cluck needed most to help their grandfather with the costumes.

Right hand this time, because Dax thought Cluck had learned. Pépère had kept the secret, so everyone thought Cluck only held needles with his right fingers now.

Cluck didn’t fight. Fighting would just lose him use of more of his hand.

Dax took the needle and held Cluck’s ring finger. He bent it back, the pressure building at the joint. Cluck felt himself getting smaller, the edges of him pulling in, until he was half his age again. Folding his tongue, pressing it against the roof of his mouth, clenching his back teeth to keep from crying, because if he started crying, Dax would think he had him, and he’d break every one of his fingers until he gave him what he wanted.

A tear found the cut on Cluck’s lower lip, the salt stinging. It wasn’t the pain coming. It was all the lies after. I closed my hand in a door. I fell. I got my fingers caught in the wire. Trying them on like his grandfather’s old clothes, seeing which one fit. Coming up with one good enough that even Pépère would believe it. And the fear of what his mother would do to him if she knew he’d stolen something from Dax.

It was Pépère arguing with his mother about why she hadn’t taken Cluck to a doctor. His mother screaming that—Nom de Dieu!—she hadn’t known anything was wrong with the boy’s hand. Pépère yelling that it was her fault for not watching her sons, that now he’d watch Cluck since clearly she didn’t, that now the doctors couldn’t do anything unless they had the money to get his fingers broken again and reset. The knowledge that Cluck had done it wrong, curling his fingers under to protect them when he should have set them straight.

That one tear soaked into the cracks on his lips. Then there was just the taste of salt. The memory of nine years ago, of Dax bending back the fingers on his left hand. Where’d you put the net? But Cluck wouldn’t tell. Dax snapped his pinkie to show he wasn’t kidding, but Cluck wouldn’t tell. Surprise shot across Dax’s face. Then he broke Cluck’s ring finger. Tell me what you did with the net. Cluck still wouldn’t say. An almost-fear had flared in Dax’s eyes, the clean, new knowledge that even though Cluck was small, and ugly, and stupid, he would not talk when hit.

Dax had broken Cluck’s third finger anyway.

This time Dax had his right hand, his right ring finger. This time shutting up wasn’t a way to get half his hand broken.

It was how to survive this.

But a question had gotten into Cluck. It’d been burrowing in since he walked away from Lace. And he wasn’t as good at keeping quiet as he was nine years ago.

He looked up at Dax. “Did you let them put another net in the water?”

Dax held Cluck’s hand still, the pressure steady for that one second, not easing up, not pushing harder.

“Did you?” Cluck asked. Pain got around the words, strangling the sound out of them.

Dax wrenched Cluck’s finger, and the bone cracked like ice in hot water. Cluck clenched his teeth to keep himself quiet. They cut his tongue, and blood spread through his mouth.

The pain tore through his arm up to his shoulder. This was Dax’s flight call to Cluck, the stab of a new bone break, something that hurt enough to make him remember.

It would remind him to stay with the flock.

Dax dropped his hand.

They shared a breath out.

Dax left, slamming the trailer door. The vibration splintered through Cluck’s finger. He gritted his teeth against the pain. That feeling of cracking ice, bound around his finger like a ring, pulled every other feeling from his body. The memory of his mouth on Lace’s. The warmth of her under his hands. The grain of cottonwood bark on his palms and the soles of his feet.

Dax must not have checked the yellow trailer. He hadn’t seen Lace had already left. Her things were already gone.

Qui ne risque rien n’a rien.

He who risks nothing has nothing.

“Where are you going?” Eugenie asked.

Cluck kept his hand at his side so she wouldn’t notice his finger, bent out of place.

“We need milk,” he said. They always needed something. Bread. A crate of peaches or strawberries. Eggs, bought a flat at a time. The least le bâtard could do was make himself useful.

He taped his ring finger to his middle one, three bands to hold them together. If he’d known to do this when he was nine, if he’d had enough unbroken fingers to pair them up, maybe he’d still be Luc. Not cygnon. Not Cluck.

The bones in his finger wouldn’t settle. He’d lost the feeling of his veins and muscle holding him together. He’d burnt out into pieces, like firewood gone dark. The wind breathed on the few live embers left, keeping them lit. The little knives stabbing into his ring finger every time he moved his right hand. The cut on his tongue. The wet salt of blood, drying on his lower lip. Where Lace had set the glow of her mouth, a burn’s left-behind heat. The rest of him was as broken as wood crumbling into ash.

He scratched at his lower lip. The cut opened again, and he tasted the salt in his blood.

He wasn’t going after her. If she was there, he didn’t want to see her. He just wanted to know how much of a liar she was, if she believed that conte de bonne femme. Some story about the scar she’d gotten when one of his feathers stuck to her arm.

Keeping his head down worked. The woman at the lakeside took his money, told him to enjoy the show.

The audience gathered on a low cliffside, just high enough to see down into the water. His grandfather told him that before the lake took those trees, there’d been a wide beach between the drop and the waterline.

Cluck stood behind everybody else who spread blankets on the rough grass and rocky ground. The sun had gotten low enough to make the lake glow. The blue-green was translucent as a dragonfly’s wings. He could see straight down to those sunken trees, bare of leaves, an always-winter. Those reaching branches made him shudder, the stark look of dead things.

An old man stood on the bank, holding a pan flute as long as his torso. His fingers, dark and wrinkled as a shelled chestnut, gripped the woven band. He blew a first note, wide and empty as the sky. The first mermaid, a purple one, took her cue and swam in. A few more bars, and another came, bright yellow like a nectarine. Another couple of minutes, and they’d all gathered. Turquoise and indigo. The mint green of tarnished copper.

They moved like kelp, the shapes of their bodies rippling like a current. They didn’t fight their costumes. Instead they looked like they’d gone their whole lives with their legs sealed in the shimmer of beads and sequins. They bent backward and touched their own fins. They joined hands, and the sheer fabric trailing from their tails became the points of enormous stars. Pairs of mermaids touched their fins and arched their backs to form hearts.

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.

A few of his aunts had whispered their suspicions that Margaux’s disrespect for the family business would turn her into a crow one day. They told stories of how it had happened before, years ago. A wayward son, a runaway sister, all turned to black-feathered things. But even they would never be afterfeathers. They were whole birds, not extra plumes that broke the line of their own wings.

“Sorry,” Cluck said, this time for asking about the pink mermaid.

He put his hands in his pockets, not remembering his broken finger until it hit the lining seam. He held a grunt at the back of his throat.

The woman looked up. The pinch to her eyelids fell away. The way her stare moved over his hair, his face, his shirt, made him feel like she was cataloguing him, figuring out what specimen jar to put him in.

He stepped back, hands vibrating with the knowledge that he could not fight with his right hand now, or his left. Any second, the woman would scream to call the rest of the family, warning them that a Corbeau had crossed the woods.

She didn’t. Her eyes settled on the collar of his shirt, where a few drops of blood had stained the white.

She shook her head, the light shifting over her face. “What did they do to you?”

“They didn’t,” he said. She probably thought Lace’s cousins had gotten him, and he’d come to finish the fight.

She folded over the costume tail and got up.

He moved back a little slower than she moved forward. She reached him, taking his elbows in her palms. Her stare was so fixed, still even when a moth fluttered between them, that he didn’t pull away.

She could kill him. Holding his elbows could spread the Palomas’ poison through him.

But if he pulled away, if he startled her into thinking he was violent, she’d yell. Lace’s cousins would come kill him themselves.

“You’re a beautiful boy,” the woman said, quiet as the click of the moth’s wings.

She moved her palms to his forearms, and pulled his hands from his pockets. His wrists stiffened. She lightly clasped his fingers, and his muscles settled and stilled.

“You know this, don’t you?” she asked. “That you’re a beautiful boy?”

Her eyes were so round, like the blue spots on a peacock’s tail fan, that for a second he believed it. That he was more than red-stained feathers and three broken fingers.

Four broken fingers. Three on the left, wrecked years ago. One on the right, the break new. The bones in his right ring finger floated like glass shards in water.

If Lace had told the truth, if this family had locked her out for that scar, this woman hadn’t done it. If there was that kind of malice in her, he would have felt it in his finger. The weight would have ground down his knuckle joint.

She put her arms around him. He tensed. She held onto him, but didn’t tighten her hold.

The scent of her pressed into him. She smelled like halved apples and the new metal of sewing needles and a little like cinnamon. Remembering Mémère’s picture, those watercolor eyes and light Alsatian braids, turned this woman’s scent to lavender, the shells of pale green eggs, those doilies his grandmother crocheted from when she ten until she died.

Mémère would have hugged him this way, if he’d been born soon enough to know her. But she’d died years before, so all he had was guessing.

The tension didn’t leave, but it shrank, pulled its branches back into its heartwood. He shut his eyes.

His finger hurt so much he bit down, and his lip opened again.

He pulled away. The woman let him.

“Thank you,” he said.

The woman pressed her lips together, and went back to her sewing.

He left looking over his shoulder. The woman didn’t look at him. She stared into the dark, moving her needle without watching it.

He still had to get the milk. Without it, there’d be questions about where he’d gone. He couldn’t go by the liquor mart again. That left the grocery store. So he walked to the wide parking lot it shared with a twenty-four-hour donut shop and a boarded-up storefront that once sold vacuums.

The thought of the grocery store’s fluorescents made him cringe. He’d feel their hum and buzz in his broken ring finger. But he walked, and the crackling in that small bone faded.

He peeled off the three rings of white tape on his right hand.

He curled his right fingers into a fist. He folded them down, and spread them out. His ring finger came with the rest, closing until his fingertips met his palm. Then it opened with them, stretched out straight as the woman’s needle.

The three wrecked fingers on his left hand stayed curled under, stuck closed. But the right one worked like Dax had never touched it.

Cluck could still feel la magie noire from the Paloma woman’s hands. It shivered from his healed finger to the rest of his body. He could feel his blood carrying it to every part of him, turning him into something even darker and more dangerous than what he’d been born.

De noche, todos los gatos son pardos.

At night, all cats are black.

A woman stuck her head out of the donut shop door. “You want to come in?”

“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.”

Then she just held the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing her front into her knees. “Everyone in this town thinks I’m crazy now, don’t they?”

By morning the whole town would probably hear about the girl who snapped while waiting for a bus.

“You want me to lie to you?” he asked.

“So that’s a yes.”

“If they know you’re from a show family, then believe me, they thought you were crazy already.” He poured hot water over lavender buds, thyme leaves, lemon peel, the way his grandfather told him Mémère used to for her sisters when they couldn’t sleep, and then for Pépère and their children.

The lavender and lemon cut the scent of rain. It had stopped, but the metallic smell of clouds hung on.

“They really kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cluck sat next to her on the built-in and set the cup in her hands. “Your family?“

She took it. “It’s not that simple.”

He rolled up one of the shirtsleeves, one slow cuffing-up at a time, in case she stopped him. She didn’t.

He folded the cuff up to show the semiplume imprint. “You thought I gave you this?”

“It’s your feather,” she said.

The truth pinched at him. It did look like one of his feathers, its shadow caught and made still.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t put it there. I promise. It’s a burn. It’ll heal, and it’ll either scar or it won’t.”

It wasn’t Cluck’s choice whether it stayed, but he wanted it to. He wanted that mark on her, the copy of one of his feathers. The shame of it pushed up against his anger about Dax signing off that net.

“How’d you get out of that thing?” Cluck asked. “The night the mixing tank blew.”

“How do you think?” she asked. “I ripped my costume.”

He remembered putting the fabric and beading into the river, watching the water take it. “That was your tail Dax had, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

That was why she’d kissed him, because he’d taken something that had once been part of her out of his brother’s hands.

“Don’t you hate me?” she asked.

“For not telling me? I can’t blame you, seeing as how I took it so well.”

“No, because you hate my family.”

“I don’t hate your family,” he said. “I hate what they did.”

“How do you know they did it?”

“I wasn’t there, so I don’t. But my best guess is that they did.”

“Your best guess is wrong,” she said.

He wasn’t doing this again. Whatever happened twenty years ago, neither of them had been around to be part of it. Lace hadn’t even been born when the Palomas got his grandfather laid off. It wasn’t on her. Cluck was keeping the rest of their families outside the trailer door. There wasn’t enough room for everybody.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“You tell me. If you knew for sure you were right, would you still want me here?”

“If you knew for sure you were, would you want to be here?”

She brushed her thumb over the cut on his lip. The pad was hot from the cup.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“You should see the other guy.”

“It wasn’t my cousins, was it?”

“No.”

“Who was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. There aren’t usually introductions.” He got up from the built-in. “Drink that, okay?”

“Are you drugging me so you can go through my suitcase?” she asked. “I’ll save you some trouble. Yes, my costume’s in there. Not that I’ll need it anytime soon.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She rubbed her thumb over a cuff button. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I’m not,” he said. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have wanted to know her. He’d never have known what it felt like to hold a girl with a fear of falling, to help her steady her weight on those high branches. He never would have met that woman who made him so sure what Mémère would have been like.

He listened for the back door of the house opening or closing. He shouldn’t have had Lace in the blue and white trailer with him. But he was so far past “shouldn’t.” He’d held a Paloma girl close enough to feel the heat of her mouth through his shirt. He’d let a Paloma woman fix the splintered bone in his ring finger. If the Palomas’ magie noire was poison, he had more than enough in him to kill him. And if it didn’t, it meant there was so much in him it was turning him, his body folding it into its cells until he was immune.

Cluck wouldn’t tell anyone about the Paloma who’d fixed his ring finger. They’d just call her une sorcière. He didn’t even know how to tell Lace without sounding like he was calling the woman a witch.

“You want to come back to the show?” he asked her.

Lace watched the lavender spin in the cup.

“You’re good at your job,” he said. “No one wants to lose you.”

She flicked the side of the cup with her forefinger, and the buds spun the other way.

“No one has to know,” he said.

“Half your family must have heard us.” She set the teacup down. “I think they already do.”

“They didn’t hear what we were saying. My brother. He just thinks we’re, uh … You know.”

She laughed and curled on her side, looking up at the trailer’s water-stained ceiling. Mémère’s dreamless cure was working.

“Why’d you come after me?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I went out for milk.”

She shut her eyes. “What happened to your hand?”

Even half-asleep, she kept trying.

“Car door,” he said.

“Which one?”

“Which car?” he asked. “It was this old Ford. It barely ran. We don’t have it anymore.”

“Which hand, Cluck?”

A hollow place inside him grew hot and tight, like the neutron stars in Pépère’s books. He checked his right ring finger. It bent and straightened. He flinched, wondering if Mémère’s tea let Lace see things, places now healed but once broken.

Lace let her cheek fall against the mattress. “It’s not fair. You know everything about me now.”

“No, I don’t.”

“There’s stuff I want to know about you, and there’s nothing left you want to know about me.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “There’s plenty I want to know.”

“Like what?”

“How you look in that tail.”

She smiled, not making it all the way to a laugh, and slept.

The muscles in his right hand hummed, full of electricity as dry clouds. The bone knitting in his ring finger was new and restless. It wanted to act, to make something. So he collected the years of white peacock feathers off the floor, and took his wires and tools to the Airstream.

Thanks to Lace, a little of la magie noire ran through his blood. A trace of what made her a Paloma had gotten into him.

He liked it, that sense of something new and sharp and alive. If he forgot for a second that Lace and that woman who made him think of Mémère were Palomas, it made him feel safe and awake. Like when everyone was gone in the afternoon, and Cluck slept for that one quiet hour before call time, knowing Dax and his mother were far from the blue and white trailer. He’d wake up and splash cold water on his face, ready for all the evening’s noise and little lights.

But just because he liked what Lace had done to him didn’t mean he’d let it go one way.

It was time he returned the favor.

Qui craint le danger ne doit pas aller en mer.

He who fears danger should not go to sea.

He didn’t remember finishing, or falling asleep.

The sun came through the Airstream’s curtains, needling his eyes. It lit up the worktable, and the hundreds of leucistic feathers wired into wings. They had the same frame as the other wings, bent metal standing in for humerus, ulna, radius. Carpals and metacarpals. The leucistic peacock’s back coverts, molted each season, shaped the grain of the feathers.

The sun showed the faint washes on the eyespots. The sheer yellow of a lemon slice’s inner curve. A blush of pink and violet. The blue and green of certain chickens’ eggs.

He sat up and rubbed the back of his neck, stiff from falling asleep at the table. He hadn’t been able to use the wire frame he’d salvaged after the accident. Those were for men’s wings, too tall and broad for Lace’s body.

He checked the blue and white trailer. “Lace?”

She wasn’t there. She’d smoothed the sheet on the built-in, folded the blanket. Her suitcase was flopped closed but not locked.

A point of light winked from the floor. He picked it up, held it to the window. A plastic sequin, pink and translucent as a grapefruit segment.

He took off toward the woods. If that sequin had fallen off what he thought it had fallen off of, he had to find her before Dax did.

He ran toward the river, listening for the sound of her splashing over the soft rush of the current.

Through the reeds, he spotted the pink of her costume and the wet black of her hair. She turned in the water, the sun glinting off her body. It made the drops on her shoulders and arms glow. It glimmered through the beads and sequins on her costume. Her fin flicked the river, a petal off a tulip tree.

Her skin was healing. Though still dark as new blackberries, the heart on her cheek had grown small as an apricot. The burns on her back had lightened and started to scar over.

She dove down, staying under so long he thought of the colanders catching her tail.

“Lace?” He took off his shirt to go in after her.

She surfaced, blinking the sediment from her eyes. How did she tread with that tail on? Wet, with all the beading, it must’ve weighed ten pounds.

His family would tell him countless men had lost their lives this way. In stories, soldiers and travelers neared ponds and rivers, drawn by les feux follets, those luring lights, and the laughter and singing of water spirits. Some were like Melusine, the river spirit whose legs became fins every Saturday. If a mortal man caught her in her true form, she would turn to a serpent and kill him.

These were his family’s bedtime stories, those evil women with scales on their bodies and fins for feet. Where other children were told not to play with fire, Cluck and his brother and cousins were warned off water. When Cluck was thirteen or fourteen, his grandfather cautioned him against the nivasia, mermaids who became pregnant by mortal men and then murdered them.

All those stories ended the same. She was beautiful. A man loved her. She killed him.

Lace saw him, but didn’t startle.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“You said you wanted to see it.” She flicked her tail, and water sprayed his forearms. “I thought if I showed you, you’d tell me what happened to your hand.”

“I never agreed to that.”

The shape of her bare breasts showed, lighter brown than the rest of her. They floated like fallen oranges. He couldn’t tell whether the accident had scarred them. The refraction through the water kept him from seeing.

The blue-black of the river made them look pale. They glowed like twin moons, turned gold from staying near the horizon.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck. “You’re not wearing a top.”

“What were you expecting? A couple of clam shells and a piece of string?”

“Don’t give me that.” He’d seen the show. The Paloma women wore costume pieces that looked like bras covered in sequins. “If you all performed topless, the chamber of commerce would have you arrested before your hair dried, and you know it. You’ve got to wear something.”

“We do,” she said. “And mine got ruined the night you found me.”

She must have forgotten how much length her hair had lost that night. When she lifted her shoulders out of the water, the ends stuck to her breasts, but didn’t cover them. He looked at them so hard he could almost feel their weight in his palms. He wondered if the water would leave them cool, or if they’d give off the warmth that lived under her skin. He thought of touching her until there was none of the river’s cold left on her, just the heat of his hands.

Those thoughts stayed on him. He felt them sticking to him like his feathers stuck to the back of his neck when his hair was wet. That feeling, strong as the prickling of vanes and barbs, made him want to check his body for some mark she’d left on his skin. There had to be something on him that would tell her how much he wanted to touch her, a thing clear and dark as the imprint his feather had put on her.

“You’re blushing,” she said. “I thought you were French.”

“Not that kind of French.”

She flicked her tail again. The glass beads looked like the million bubbles of water just starting to boil.

If any of the family caught them, they’d have worse trouble than stories about Melusine and the nivasia.

“Get out of that thing before somebody sees you.” He knelt on the bank. “Where’s your dress?”

She went under again, staying close enough to the surface that he could make her out. Her hair was as dark and blue-black as the river until the sun lit it up and turned it red-brown. Her back looked like a sandbar glinting with mica. He couldn’t tell the scarring from the rippled water.

Her tail reminded him of raw pink salt. As she moved, the light found the clusters of glass beads.

She surfaced. The sun on the water broke into pieces.

She swam up to the bank and rested her forearms on a rock. “You coming in?”

“I don’t swim,” he said.

“You don’t know how?”

“I know how.” He wasn’t going to win any contests for holding his breath, but he knew how not to drown. How to get out of a colander and how to fight a current. His grandfather had taught him so he would keep safe around rivers, not so he could swim in them. “I just don’t.”

“Fine.” She wrung out her hair and let it all fall to one side of her neck, leaving one of her breasts bare under the water. He hoped the distance between them was enough to hide where he was looking. “But I’m not getting out until you get in,” she said.

Pépère didn’t much care for water, so Cluck didn’t either. It had to do with the Romani traditions, what parts of their bodies they could wash at which places in the river, how if a man didn’t know the current, something clean could be made mochadi. Unclean.

But Cluck had never learned all the rules. His mother had told him he was too young to understand, and then, when he was older, too stupid. That he shouldn’t worry about it because they were lucky enough to have running water. They didn’t have to think about the Romani laws that ran in his grandfather’s blood like silt in streams.

Lace brushed a hand over his thigh, leaving her wet fingerprints on his pants. “You coming in, or not?”

His shirt was already unbuttoned and off, from almost going in after her. So he pulled off his undershirt, his socks and shoes, but kept his trousers on. If his grandfather had worried over Cluck taking Lace’s dress off the night of the accident, he’d have strong words about Cluck pulling off his pants to swim. Going shirtless was bad enough. If Cluck wore nothing but his boxers around a girl, Pépère would know. He’d just know, the same way he knew, years ago, that Cluck was lying about having made himself right-handed.

Cluck didn’t jump or slide in. He found where the bank sloped instead of dropping off, and waded in one slow step at a time. The water soaked his ankles, then crept up his trouser legs.

If Sara-la-Kali and the Three Marys wanted to pull him back, he’d let them. But they didn’t, so he let the nivasi near him.

Lace dove down again, too far for him to see her shape.

He waded in up to his chest, the water cooling his skin. “Lace?”

She grabbed him and pulled him down. He stumbled forward, and went under.

He opened his eyes and saw the colors of her. The black of her hair, her skin the brown of river alluvium, the rose salt of her tail. Light streamed through her like she was made of water.

He ran out of air fast. When he tried to get to the surface, she held him down. He fought her, and she held him tighter.

The muscles around his lungs tensed and then cramped. She was killing him. The truth that she was a Paloma, a nivasi, dug into his skull. She would murder him before she would love him. She would keep him under and drown him.

Water got into his throat, and he couldn’t fight her anymore. She wrapped her arms around his chest, pulling him into the dark. Then she dragged him out of the water and up onto the bank.

The light stabbed into him. Air flooded into his lungs, shoving the water out.

She turned him onto his side and held a hand to his back. “Breathe.”

He coughed up the water.

She held onto him. “Breathe.”

He sat up and gasped to get his breath. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“I was trying to move you,” she whispered. “Look.” She turned his head.

The muscles near his lungs eased and then tightened again. Two figures showed through the tree cover. Two of the guys from the liquor store.

They threw pinecones into the river and pulled wild pomelos off a tree.

“What are they doing here?” He didn’t have to try to keep his voice low. He didn’t have the air to break to a whisper.

“Our families are closer together than you think,” she said.

He hadn’t thought about it since the accident. He’d gone out looking for Eugenie, and Eugenie never would’ve seen Lace if they didn’t share a band of woods with the Palomas.

Lace’s cousins found all the ripe pomelos, tugged down each yellow-green fruit. The tree seemed to straighten its shoulders, free from the extra weight. Lace’s cousins moved on, toward the Palomas’ side of the woods.

“What the hell can you do with those things?” Cluck asked. Pomelos were bitter as cough syrup, especially the wild ones.

“Aguas frescas,” Lace said. “With enough water and sugar, you can make anything drinkable.”

She pulled herself up on the bank, her tail dragging through the mud. “I’m sorry I almost drowned you.”

His breathing evened, but the guilt of thinking she was trying to kill him made the tensing of his lungs worse. “Better you than them.”

She lay on her back, squinting into the sun, and covered her breasts with her palms. The sun shone off her wet hands.

“It’s because I was hungry,” she said, like he’d asked her a question.

“What?” he asked.

“The night we met. I was buying that much from the liquor store because I was hungry. I wouldn’t eat all day because if I ate I looked fat in my tail. Then after the show I was really hungry, so I’d eat everything. Then I had to not eat the next day. Same thing every day, trying to fit into my tail.”

He looked at how the tail clung to her hips and legs. “Seems like it fits to me.”

“Thanks to hospital food.” She patted her thigh through the fabric, her other hand sliding over so her arm covered her breast. “But these show everything.”

She sounded like Clémentine and Violette with their honey and chili powder. The show’s filmy dresses floated near their bodies, hiding a lot more than that tail. It didn’t matter to them. They downed those chili powder mixes a few weeks before the show season started. We don’t want to be fat fairies, n’est-ce pas?

It wasn’t just the women. Before the shows, the men oiled their chests, and after, they argued over who the girls in the audience had looked at most. Cluck had given up competing early. His body was strong enough to do what it needed to do. He’d never be much to look at, and he’d never be as big as Dax, but he could do his work. Pépère had taught him that mattered more than how a man looked with his shirt off and wings strapped to his back.

“My grandmother was a mermaid in Florida,” Lace said. “They swim with manatees and sea turtles there.”

“Sure they do.”

“It’s true.” She turned onto her stomach. The ends of her hair brushed the bank. The mud darkened the back of her tail. “I’m gonna get there one day. Be one of their mermaids.”

If Florida was anything like his family’s show, they’d throw her out by the time she turned thirty. Thirty-five if she was really good.

“Is that what you want?” he asked.

“It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

“Then you should do it. But you should know it’s not all you can do.”

“Sure.” She turned over again. “I’ll just get a job with my rocket science degree.”

“I mean it,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of people I know for sure are smarter than I am.” It didn’t matter how bad or how ugly he was. Pépère, always asking for the wingspan of the snowy owl, or when cobalt chloride was pink and when it was blue, had made sure Cluck didn’t grow up stupid. “My grandfather’s one of them. You’re one of them.”

She squinted into the sun. “How do you know?”

“You fooled all of us, didn’t you?” he asked. “You could do anything you want.”

“I want to do something I’m good at,” she said. “I was getting good at this.”

“You’re good at a lot of things.”

She reached over for a black-red feather that had stuck to his collarbone.

Her fingers skimmed his chest, and he flinched.

Maybe this was how the peacocks felt at molting season, having him come around to pick up what they’d shed.

“Can’t you collect somebody else’s?” he asked.

“I like yours.”

“But they grow in red.” The reason sounded as weak as the idea that he would hate white birds. It sounded like a superstition with no more weight than les contes de bonne femme, the old wives’ tales. He’d never needed to give it words. His family had always understood better than he had, and they did not tell strangers.

Lace held the feather up to the light and blew on it, fluffing the barbs. A slick of river water still shone on her mouth. He wondered if it would taste more like her or more like the river.

“Cuervo,” she said, soft as breathing out.

“What?” he asked.

“My last name should have been Cuervo,” she said. “It’s my father’s last name. But my grandmother made him change it to marry my mother.”

“Why?”

“It means ‘crow.’”

Cuervo. Corbeau.

Cluck knew what Lace meant, that they weren’t so different, that the space between them was made only of names and colors. But the bitterness went into Cluck like the slip of a paring knife. He would have wanted the choice not to be a red-streaked thing among all his family’s perfect black.

Now her father took aim at the black birds in the woods, shooting his own name.

Lace propped herself up on her elbows. A thin layer of silt coated her breasts.

The scales on her back caught the light. He counted five, each perfect, like the adhesive rain hadn’t touched them. The reaction between the cyanoacrylate and the cotton of her dress should have burned them as much as the rest of her, hiding them. Instead they arced across the small of her back, smooth as coins of scar tissue, iridescent like the leucistic peacock’s eyespots. She moved her hips, and a handful of colors showed.

The blade of that paring knife pulled back, the wound mending shut.

She moved, and the waist of her tail slipped down an inch.

He counted a sixth, a seventh, each iridescent as a blue mussel shell.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he said, counting them again, this constellation of moons glowing under her skin.

Árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza.

A twisted tree will not grow straight.

Cluck took her right ankle in his hand. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”

His hair was still wet with river water. It dampened his shirt collar, graying the white cloth.

Lace’s soaked the back of her dress, turning the thin fabric cold. Her dress was a little like the one the adhesive rain ruined, off-white, saffron-colored flowers instead of blue. She was already forgetting the lost one. The details were falling away. How many petals the blue flowers had. Whether the agua de jamaica stain that stayed, stubborn, through so many washes was on the right sleeve or the left.

Tía Lora had made them both. Missing her clutched at Lace.

Now that she thought of her great-aunt, the act of showing herself to Cluck Corbeau in nothing but her tail felt like a betrayal. With her costume top gone, Lace hadn’t known what to wear on top—a bra? The camisole she slept in? So she’d just worn the tail, and the way Cluck looked at her made her feel brave and sure, like his stare was covering her so no one else could see her.

Cluck soaked a brush in a dish of iodine. It smelled like nail polish remover, salt, balsamic vinegar left out too long. Lace’s stomach tightened. Smells like that no longer reminded her of painting her nails, but of the solvents they used on her in the hospital, the morphine holding her under. The smell wrapped around her throat.

He ran the brush along the bottom of her foot. The feeling of bristles on her arch made her twitch.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re ticklish, aren’t you?”

The iodine soaked into her foot, darkening the sole so it was almost as brown as her hair. “What’s this for?”

“It’s good for climbing trees.” He held her other ankle and painted the sole of her left foot. “It seals your skin. Keeps things from getting in, makes you less sensitive to the grain of the bark.”

The night she found him in his tree, the soles of his feet had been pale as his palms, shades lighter than the rest of him. They stood out like the moon. “You don’t use it.”

“I’ve been climbing trees barefoot long enough I don’t need to.” He rinsed off the brush, twisted the iodine bottle shut. “My cousins all do it. It helps with the show.”

The iodine dried, leaving the soles of her feet tight and leathery.

He pulled her to standing. “Close your eyes.”

She did. “Why?”

His fingers brushed her shoulders and set a ribbon against her rib cage. The heel of his hand grazed her right breast, a band of thin satin following after.

Weight pulled on her back. A feather skimmed her neck.

She stopped his hands with hers. “Forget it. I’m not one of your fairies.”

“Trust me, okay?”

“Are you trying to convert me?” She reached back and slapped at him, her hand hitting the thigh of his pants.

He gathered her hair and moved it to her left shoulder. “No.” He fastened the ribbon between her shoulder blades, his fingers warm on her dress. He tied the bow and knotted it. He moved her, turning her waist to lead her. “You can open.”

Even down, the wings filled the mirror’s age-speckled glass. Her sudden breath in felt like taking air after surfacing.

At first the wings looked white as flour-covered feathers. Then the eyespots showed their colors, like the tints of a rainbow. Those after-storm skies were never as bright as children painted them. The light washes, so watered down, didn’t live in crayon boxes. This was where to find them, on the eyes of white peacocks.

A wire wing frame leaned up against the corner of the mirror, clean and bare as a winter tree. This was what Cluck did, making these winter branches, filling them in like there was summer in his hands.

But he always covered them in bronze and blue and green, not the white of frost and the glint of color when the sun hit wet ice.

“Those things on your back are a lot like these feathers, you know,” he said.

“How?” she asked.

“Iridescence.” He kept his hands on her waist. “The way the colors look like they’re changing depending on the angle. It’s all directionality. Polarization of light.” He moved her left hip a little forward, then her right, and the pale colors flashed like light through a prism. “Same as with the blue peacocks. Morpho butterflies, hummingbirds, fish.”

His breath fell on the back of her neck. “The structures are hard to describe optically, because little adjustments to the angle of illumination change what you see.” The wood and water scent he picked up from swimming displaced the vinegar smell of the iodine. “It’s a pain in the ass to study, but it’s the best thing about them.”

She shut her eyes, and listened, her pulse clinging to the spot where his breath heated her neck. Her father’s lessons never would’ve covered anything like this. To him, it wasn’t worth the time. Smart girls didn’t need to know what made some birds shimmer like soap bubbles.

Her father had taken her to the shore at night to look for sea sparkle, those algae blooms glowing like moonstones, but that was different. Noctiluca scintillans lived in the water. Her father taught her about sea sparkle for the same reason he taught her about undertows and wasp jellyfish. Noctiluca scintillans shimmered with its own light, but with the right depth and nutrients, it flared into red tide. She was una sirena, and she should know the water was full of beautiful things that were one moon phase from turning poisonous.

Cluck traced where the ribbons crossed. She didn’t point out that he was using his left hand. If she did, he’d stop.

“Biologically speaking, it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Turning yourself all those colors. Especially if you don’t have a lot of pigment, like white peacocks, or your scales. And you’re more susceptible to damage afterward.” His hand stopped over her escamas.

She opened her eyes and met his in the mirror. The sharp note of arundo reed reached across the woods, warning her that if her birthmarks were not for turistas, they were even less for a gitano boy.

“So my question is,” Cluck said. “Why do you have them?”

His hair smelled like the wet leaves dotting the current.

“Why do you have your feathers?” she asked.

He dropped his eyes from the mirror, his half-smile sad. “You got me there.”

She didn’t mean why were his red instead of all black. She meant what had given his family their plumes, the same as his question about her family’s escamas. They were both birthmarks. His feathers marked him as a Corbeau the way her escamas marked her as a Paloma. The things they wore on their bodies made them as distinct as water and sky.

“Come on.” He took his hands off her back. “I’ll show you how to open them.”

He took her outside and guided her up his favorite cottonwood, holding smaller branches away so the folded wings didn’t snag.

The coat of iodine let her feel the warmth of the ground and the bark but not the texture. When she lost her balance, the ball of her foot slid as Cluck caught her. She braced for the friction, but it didn’t hurt.

Cluck picked a branch he liked, and they stayed. He tied a ribbon to each of her hands, slack loops around her wrists. He held her hands, guiding them away from her body, until the bent wires unfolded, and the wings opened. They cast a translucent shadow on the ground below, like a glass-winged butterfly.

He slid one hand between her back and the wings. “Wings aren’t so different from arms.” He touched her shoulder blades. “This is where the scapula connects to the rest of the body.”

He pressed on her back just enough to ease her forward. She took a step, farther out on the bough. Cluck followed her, staying close enough to fill the space behind her.

The sheer silhouette of her wings crossed the lower branches. Cluck guided her so slowly she could not startle and run back toward the trunk. His touch helped her keep her balance, but he was not keeping her up. He just moved her, one slow step at a time, toward leaves and open sky.

He ran his hand down her upper arm. “This is where the secondary feathers attach.” Then her forearm. “And the primaries.” He put his fingers over hers. “And your thumb’s a lot like the alula. It helps direct flight the same way your thumb helps you do things with your hands.”

She turned her palms, interlocking her fingers with his. She wanted to tell him how much she liked the red in his feathers. But if she brought it up, it’d just make him quiet. He was quick to talk, and even quicker to stop, this boy who did not like water.

She pressed his left hand into her body, keeping her palm tight over the back of it so he couldn’t pull it away. Her thumb found the hollow between his palm and his three curved-under fingers. If they would not open, she could find her way in.

With her next step forward, the branch felt narrower under her feet than she’d expected, and she faltered. Her hands flew out, reaching for leaves or clouds.

Cluck gripped her waist. “I’ve got you.” He held her until she was still, and then lightened his touch enough to give her back the feeling of holding herself up. But his hands still stayed.

She turned enough to kiss him, fast enough that she felt a hitch in his throat when her mouth got to his. The sense of falling did not touch her, not as long as her body was between the hands of this boy who felt steadier in the air than on the ground.

But he must not have felt in his palms how anchored and still he made her. He left the smallest space between their lips and whispered again, “I’ve got you,” like he thought she might not know.

Entre dos muelas cordales nunca pongas tus pulgares.

Don’t put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth.

“It’s your turn to go buy fruit.” Clémentine shoved money into Lace’s hand. “Get the same kind of peaches. And another purple watermelon.”

Lace tried to hand it back. “I don’t want anyone seeing me. Even with makeup they all stare.”

That wasn’t the whole truth though. If her mother or aunts had stopped by for strawberries or Meyer lemons, they’d have more questions than Lace had lies. The day she left, she could’ve pretended she was on her way out of town, to stay with her cousin or Martha’s friends. But if they saw her today, they’d wonder what she was still doing in Almendro, and if word got back to Abuela, she’d know, the same way she’d known about Cluck bringing Lace to the hospital.

Clémentine rummaged in an old trunk until she found a wide-brimmed hat, its ribbon the color of lipstick. She set it on Lace’s head. “Now no one will see your face.”

Lace caught her reflection in a window. The hat must have made Clémentine and her cousins look like actresses sunning themselves, but it made Lace look like she’d gotten into the attic and was playing dress-up.

Clémentine adjusted the brim. “I’d go if the flower crowns made themselves, but they never do. Don’t forget a nectarine.”

“Just one?” Lace asked.

“For Nicole. She’ll only eat one and nobody else likes them.”

So Lace went and bought coral peaches, that single nectarine, a Moon-and-Stars watermelon from the woman who knew she didn’t like rain.

Lace watched for the brown-black of her mother’s or aunts’ hair.

The first face she recognized wasn’t a Paloma, but a Corbeau. Dax stood on the edge of the market, jaw held tight, ready to throw his fists.

Her hat blocked her view of who he was facing. She turned her head, lifting the brim.

Matías. Dax stood across from her cousin.

Matías held one foot a little in front of the other, set for a fight. He’d never beat on anyone, three against one, like Justin and his brothers. But if another man set down an insult, and if the other man was his size, he’d take the fight. Once he didn’t like the way some gabacho was looking at Martha at a gas station, saying things about how she should wear a tighter dress so everyone could see her. Matías left the man a bloody nose, and came away with a black eye. His aunts called him their little Quixote, all caballero, no brains.

Dax was bigger than Matías, broader by a little and taller by a lot. Matías always fought fair, never kicking shins or holding shirt collars. But Dax had been a few minutes from bringing a bloody tail to her family’s motel. There was nothing Lace could count on him not doing. Matías would get out no better than that shredded, stained cola de sirena.

Dax said something Lace couldn’t hear.

“We got as much right to be here as you, puto,” Matías said.

Dax moved toward him, making him back up. “You stayed because we stayed. You can’t even think for yourselves.” He shoved Matías.

Matías shoved him back, so hard Dax almost fell into a farmer’s stand. “You want to say that again?”

Lace dropped the bag of fruit and ran. She slipped between them and pushed on her cousin’s chest. “Stop it,” she yelled. El caballero would get himself killed.

Before Matías could check under the hat, Dax grabbed her. He dug his hands into her upper arms, fingers pressing her sleeves into her skin, and pulled her out of the way. He moved her, quick and clean as lifting one of his cousins during a show. Then he jammed a fist into Matías’ jaw.

Matías returned it, hitting the side of Dax’s face. His punch fell easily as a stone skipped on the lake.

“Stop it,” Lace screamed, loud enough that even Dax and Matías felt faces turn like the heads of sunflowers. “Just stop it.”

Now half the market watched them.

Dax dropped his raised fist. He and Matías both lowered their stares. Matías bent his neck to see under the hat brim, looking for the interrupter’s face.

The start of a smile tensed the corner of his mouth, like her being there was so strange he had to try not to laugh about it.

Leave it to Matías to find all this funny. She couldn’t have laughed if Justin had shown up and done his mermaid impression, batting his eyes like he was preening on a rock. She could still feel where Dax had grabbed her and pressed his thumbs into her, that sense that she might leak blood like sugar-water off bruised fruit.

She waited for the rage in her cousin’s face. It didn’t come. Confusion made his eyes and mouth look lopsided, a hitch unevenly weighted.

“You do this, one or both of you ends up in jail,” Lace said. “My guess is you both have people at home who don’t want to see that happen. So look at each other and ask yourself, is he worth it?”

They exchanged glares, scorn-sharpened. But they each took a step back, and Lace dropped her hands. They knew she was right. Matías thought of his aunts; Dax, his mother.

“Good,” she said. “Then go home.”

She stood her ground, made them leave first. Then picked up her bag of fruit and kept walking. The town went back to its chatter. Their stares dwindled to glances.

Matías was waiting for her around the side of the next fruit stand. He held his arms crossed, one shoe kicking the dirt. “So you’re staying in Terra Bella, huh? What, you thought you’d come all the way back here to buy some fruit?”

She checked to make sure Dax wasn’t around.

“You got a death wish?” Matías asked.

“Do you?” she asked.

Matías rubbed her upper arms. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“He touched you.”

“It was my sleeves,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“He still touched you.”

Not even Matías could keep las supersticiones straight. All he knew was that hitting and kicking were safe.

“I’m pretty sure it has to be skin on skin,” Lace said.

“Where’ve you been?” Matías asked. “Where are you staying?”

Her body flushed with the feeling of Cluck tying wings to her back.

“In town,” she said. “I thought if I waited Abuela out she might change her mind.”

“Can I tell Tía Lora?” Matías asked. “She’s worried about you.”

Lace wished he could. But she didn’t want her aunt looking for her and finding her at the Corbeaus’. She hated thinking of her great-aunt catching her in those wings, cringing when she realized Lace was living among the people who had murdered her husband.

“No.” She picked a peach from the paper bag and held it out; Matías took it. “Don’t tell anyone. If Abuela finds out I’m waiting, she’ll dig in her heels.”

He turned the peach in his hand. “Hey, Lace?”

“Yeah?”

“It wasn’t fair,” he said.

It was all he said.

“Thank you,” she said back.

He knocked her hat brim. “What the hell are you wearing?”

She pinched his elbow.

To him, she was another Licha, cast out from the family. He probably thought she’d get by okay; Licha did nails now and made good money. But she’d never come back to the show, and she never saw the family except for Christmas and Pentecostés.

But she was no Licha. Licha had peeled off the emerald green of her tail and left it behind, never aching for it again. Lace wanted to lift up the back of her dress and show Matías her escamas were all still there. They were her sign from Apanchanej that she was still una sirena, even if not a Paloma.

She felt a stare still on her. Her eyes crawled to its source. A little girl stood by her mother’s legs. She was short enough to see under the hat brim.

Lace touched her cheek, wondering if she’d forgotten to brush on a last layer of powder.

The girl rocked on the balls of her feet. The sun flashed off her shoes. Pink jelly sandals. Lace had last seen those shoes on the wet ground near the lake.

She wasn’t staring at Lace’s cheek. This was a girl who’d reached a small hand out for a grapefruit-pink fin. She’d seen Lace as a mermaid. Now she’d seen her out of her tail, no longer la sirena rosa, no longer a Paloma.

Lace put her finger to her lips, asking the girl to keep the secret.

The girl’s smile spread through her whole face. First teeth, then eyes. To her, Lace had shed her fins and grown legs, maybe until midnight, maybe forever. She probably thought Matías was a prince she’d come on land for. If she noticed that Lace had been the only mermaid without river pearls or shells in her hair, maybe she took it to mean that the pink mermaid was not so tied to the water that she could not walk.

“Lace?” Matías said.

“Yeah?”

“Go stay with Martha’s friends,” he said. “Abuela’s never gonna change her mind.”

Cual el cuervo, tal el huevo.

The egg is the same as the bird.

Lace stopped at the end of the hall and reached into the fruit bag. She’d bring Nicole Corbeau her one nectarine. Not because she liked her, but because Clémentine had asked her to. Nicole Corbeau may have taught Lace to fix her cheek, but she’d also turned her back on her youngest son, the son who didn’t start fights in fruit markets.

She knocked on the bedroom door. “Nicole?” She listened for the floorboards’ groan.

She knocked harder. The latch gave under Lace’s hand, and clicked undone. The door eased open, hinges squealing.

“Nicole?” Lace said.

The door opened a little more and showed an empty room. Bed neatly made. Doilies centered under lamps. Everything in place but a photo album splayed on the desk.

Lace set the nectarine next to it.

The album’s cover gave off the must of old leather. The two open pages showed the same two people in eight different photos. Nicole Corbeau, her face almost the same, her hair shorter. And a little boy strangers must have called handsome. In one, they both gave the camera their smiles. In another, the boy chased a squirrel across a park, and the woman clapped her hands to her mouth, mid-laugh. Another showed her in a car’s passenger seat, him in the driver’s, small hands pretending to steer.

Lace flipped through the album, backward and forward, and found the same two people a hundred times. The woman clasped the boy’s hands as he got the feel of walking. They held the ugliest poodle Lace had ever seen. They lifted their flour-covered hands toward the camera. Some were just of the boy. Halfway up a tree. Showing off a model airplane.

In the background of a few, there was a second boy. Smaller and darker, hair a little longer and messier, curls brushing his collar. In one, he sat on a patch of far-off grass, hands cupping a feather. In another, he was just a blur of motion, like a comet’s trail. Never in focus. Never a suggestion that Nicole Corbeau knew there was another boy in the frame. This left-handed boy, nothing more than a smudge.

“Do you like the book?” Nicole Corbeau’s voice hit the back of Lace’s neck.

Lace snapped her head toward the door. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to look.”

“Look all you like.” Nicole Corbeau sat on the bed. “If I didn’t want them seen, I wouldn’t leave them lying around.”

“Do you have other ones?” she asked. “Other pictures?”

“Of who? Le petit démon?” Nicole Corbeau laughed, sharp and beautiful as cut crystal.

Lace didn’t need to speak French to understand. Le petit démon. She pulled away from the desk and left the room. “Enjoy your nectarine.”

“For God’s sake, laugh,” Nicole Corbeau called into the hall. “Don’t they have jokes in this town?”

Lace emptied the peaches into the kitchen’s fruit bowl. She left the watermelon on the counter and crumpled the paper bag.

Whoever Cluck and Dax’s father was, Cluck must not have looked enough like him to satisfy Nicole Corbeau. Cluck had that blue-black hair, his olivewood skin, the shape of his eyes. He’d gotten them from his grandfather. They’d stayed hidden in Nicole’s generation, but showed up in Cluck like a photograph developing in solution. Dax, with the lighter brown of his hair and his eyes like haze, must have convinced Nicole that tamping down the Romani blood took only strength of will. He had done it. Cluck hadn’t, and it, along with his left-handedness and the red in his feathers, made his own mother call him le petit démon.

The back door flew open and slammed into the wall.

Dax came in and grabbed Lace’s forearms. “You should’ve stayed out of it.”

She cried out at the feeling of his skin on hers. No sleeves in between. She twisted her arms, trying to pull away. “Let me go.”

He backed her against the counter. “It was none of your business.”

“Was that guy worth a night in jail?” She jerked her head up, finding his eyes. “What were you gonna do? Push him into a stack of cantaloupe crates in front of half the town? How do you think your mother would’ve liked that?”

This logic had worked on Justin. He’d wanted to keep his mother happy, so he’d listened. Same with Dax. He must’ve known he was the only one in his mother’s scrapbooks.

Dax’s hands made her forearms cramp. If he gripped her any harder, the feather Cluck left on her would grow blades for barbs and slice his palms.

She looked for a little of Cluck in his face. His brow bone. The line of his nose. The shape of his jawline.

“I appreciate the thought,” Dax said. “I really do. But stay out of this.”

She came up empty. Dax and Cluck may have been made of the same things, but they were no more alike than sand and glass.

“You’re loyal.” Dax threw the crumpled bag on the table. “That counts with us. But stay out of things you don’t know anything about.”

He yanked her over to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. He held her hands under and squirted dish soap into her palms.

“What, you think my hands aren’t clean?” she asked. “You think I’m gonna make everything dirty?”

“This isn’t for us.” He rubbed his hands over hers. “It’s for you.”

“I know how to wash my own hands.”

He scrubbed her harder. “Do you know what happens to people who touch them?”

“Who?”

“The guy you shoved.”

The feel of his hands and the soap’s fake lemon reached her stomach. She swallowed to keep everything still.

Her words stalled in her throat. They turned to a weak hum. Her hands went limp in his.

The Paloma instinct still ruled her. Even to stop a fight, she’d touched Matías instead of Dax. And this family was as afraid of touching a Paloma as hers was of touching a Corbeau.

“If you touch them and you don’t know what you’re doing, they make you sick,” Dax said.

Know what you’re doing. Hitting. Kicking. Things that drew blood.

Dax splashed a last rinse over her hands. He loosened his grip and reached for a dish towel.

She pulled her hands free and ran out the back door.

“You should be thanking me,” Dax yelled after her.

She kept going until she got to the river. She searched the water. The dull pink hadn’t surfaced. Her tail hadn’t washed up again. She plunged her hands in, looking out for the fabric and beads, letting the river strip away the dish soap and the feel of Dax’s hands.

The sun fell below the tops of the trees. Cluck found her as the light turned the branches gold.

“What were you thinking?” he asked.

She kept her eyes on the water. “News travels fast.”

“I hired you,” he said. “Anything you do, I hear about it. What if Dax had figured out who you were? What if—who was he, your brother, your cousin? What if he’d figured out where you were?”

“But they didn’t,” she said.

He got in front of her. His eyes adjusted, almost red in this light. When the sun hit his hair, long and messy enough to hide his feathers, it looked copper.

“You think you’re outside of this,” he said. “You think because your family threw you out you’re not part of this. Guess what, it doesn’t work that way.”

She looked past him at the water. Sundown cast a sheet of rose gold over the surface.

“I get it,” Cluck said. “Believe me, I do. I wouldn’t want Dax messing up anyone I cared about either.”

Lace looked at him. “Are you kidding? Matías would’ve kicked his ass.”

His shoulders relaxed, and he almost smiled. “Then I’m sorry I didn’t get to see it.”

She unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off him. Pulled his undershirt off by the bottom hem.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She took his hands and led him into the river, making him walk with her until the water lapped at his thighs and her hips.

It swirled around them. The rose gold curled into scrolls. The sun’s hands warmed his bare back. She set her palms on his skin and found it fever-hot.

The scar on her forearm meant she could never be loyal to her family. Her name meant she could never be loyal to the Corbeaus. The only one left to be loyal to was him.

“This is the border between my family’s part of the woods, and yours,” she said. “Right here, we’re not standing anywhere that belongs to anybody.”

“Yes, we are,” he said. “Because it’s water.”

“I was careful,” she said.

He held a wet palm to her cheek. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Everybody gets hurt,” she said. “You know that.”

Jamais couard n’aura belle amie.

Faint heart never won true love.

He gave Lace a head start, so she’d get back to the house before he did. He’d wait a few minutes and then follow. The last thing they needed was Dax seeing them both together, soaked in river water.

His wet clothes stuck to him. He turned his back to the river. Every glint off the water felt sharp as a glass shard. Every rustle of the current through the tree roots stung. In a few days his family would pack up, leave Almendro for the next town, and put a long stretch of highway between them and this river.

Lace’s shadow disappeared into the farthest trees, and all the sharp edges settled into his chest.

It wasn’t this river he’d miss. It was the girl who kept pulling him into it.

He went after her. He wanted them both to stand in the winter rain of the Carmel River, the shallows like topaz. He wanted to show her blue hour Mexican jays and vermillion flycatchers, bright as flames, lured hundreds of miles outside their range by the silt of the Pajaro. He wanted them both to find their footing in the glacier-carved bed of Fallen Leaf, the water new from the rain turning over the whole lake every eight years.

“Lace.” He caught up and put a hand on her arm.

She turned into his touch, but said, “I thought the whole point was showing up at different times.”

He dropped his hand from her arm. “Have you thought about what you’re gonna do when we leave town?”

The shadow of a few leaves crossed her face. “Not really.”

He tried not to nod, knowing his nod would look slow and heavy. With her two-word answer, the disappointment crept up on him. He hadn’t realized until he’d asked the question that he’d wanted her to say yes, she’d worried about it like he did when he saw the light on the water. Or no, that it hadn’t occurred to her. Something surer than “not really.” “Not really” was her version of a shrug.

Maybe after this week, he wouldn’t be anything more to her than the guy who showed her how to climb a tree. She’d remember him putting white feathers on her back, but she’d forget, one color at a time, the way the sun hit them.

It was still worth asking. She’d already covered him like beads of river water.

“Would you consider coming with me?” he said.

The sky flashed gold in her eyes. “What?”

“I mean coming with us,” he said. “We’re heading out on Monday. Madera County, then Mariposa. I know it means you wouldn’t be near your family, but how much are you really seeing them now?”

“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,” she said.

“I don’t. I’m saying you have a job with us if you want it.”

“You don’t have to look out for me.”

“Do you have somewhere else you want to go?” he asked. “Do you have somewhere else you want to be more than you want to be with me?”

Her lips parted, her eyes going over the ground like she was searching for the glimmer of something lost. But she didn’t say anything.

“Sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to answer right now. You can think about it.”

She lifted her eyes from the ground. “No.”

“No, you don’t want to think about it?” he asked.

“No, there’s nowhere I want to be more than where you are.”

He felt the sky shifting deeper blue, falling toward the dark of the water.

“What?” he asked.

“I haven’t thought about what would happen when you left town because I didn’t want to,” she said. “I didn’t want to think about being somewhere you’re not.”

“Is that a yes?” he asked.

She smiled, and the woods turned from shadow to all blue, pure and dark. “What do you think?”

He slid a hand onto the back of her neck and pulled her into him.

The harder he kissed her, the more he picked up the taste of river salt, pink as her tail, glinting on her mouth like glass beads. He could smell the sun-warmed water and wild sky lupines of Honey Lake. He could feel them both getting their clothes soaked in the Estrella River, its water stirred by a hundred little earthquakes they’d never feel unless he held her so close and so still his breath sounded the same as hers.

Lace pulled away and brushed his hair out of his face. “How are you gonna explain this to your brother?”

He spread his hands over the small of her back, feeling for the heat of her birthmarks through her dress. “Let me worry about that.”

Ce que chante la corneille, chante le corneillon.

As the crow sings, so sings the fledging.

Cluck scrubbed the same places over and over. It left his chest reddened, his arms raw. But he still felt the brush of the current, his skin made hot by sun and then cooled by water.

If he didn’t rub it all off, someone would know. This must have been like the guilt that men who cheated felt. How they washed other women’s perfumes from their shoulders. But instead of a mistress, Cluck had Lace and her river. Instead of a wife, he had feathers that told him not to touch a girl with scales. A family that would smell the silt and water vines if he didn’t scour away the scent.

He turned off the water, and dressed, damp feathers scratching the back of his neck.

He owed Clémentine. She’d agreed to be the one to say she wanted Lace to stay on. She hadn’t hidden the smile at the corner of her mouth when Cluck asked her, but she must have known why she had to do it instead of him. Clémentine was one of les vedettes du spectacle, as much a lead in the show as Dax was. She had the standing to ask for things. Cluck didn’t.

His grandfather’s coughing carried down the hall. It took on the hard, deep sound of shaking his lungs. It had gone farther into his chest.

Cluck opened the door without knocking.

The orange prescription bottle sat on his grandfather’s dresser, the pills as high as the day it was filled.

Cluck’s lungs felt as full of water as when Lace held him under. He should’ve known his grandfather wouldn’t swallow a single one unless Cluck made such an annoyance of himself about it that Pépère considered it less trouble just to take the damn pills.

But Cluck hadn’t done that. He’d forgotten. He’d been too busy kissing Lace, taking her up into the trees, letting her pull him into the river.

Cluck shook his head. “Pépère.”

His grandfather finished coughing into a handkerchief, his back turned. “I told you I didn’t like that gadji.”

The words flared through Cluck’s face, the same shame as when he was small and his mother caught him petting wild birds. She would yell at him, say he would bring the bird’s sickness home to his brother, and was that what he wanted?

Pépère’s voice had never made his forehead feel hot. His grandfather did not scold or yell. He gave advice, his words ballasted with a calm that told Cluck if he did not listen, he would find out himself.

Use your left hand when they are not looking, but always the right when they can see.

Since your feathers are too many to pluck, wear your hair long to cover them, or the gadje will gossip more than they already do.

Stay away from water, or the nivasia will kill you.

Cluck shut the door behind him. “You’re not taking your pills.”

“Don’t talk to me about pills.” His grandfather folded the handkerchief. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

The faint outline of his grandfather’s face showed on the window glass. Cluck couldn’t make out his expression, only the white flash of the handkerchief.

“You didn’t know what you were doing when you hired her,” Pépère said. “And now we are bringing her with us, and you still don’t know what you’re doing.”

Cluck hunched his shoulders, wishing he’d had the chance to tell his grandfather before word got around the family. Clémentine worked fast.

“You’d like her if you got to know her,” Cluck said.

Pépère gave a curt laugh, made rough by his torn-up throat. “Why would I want to know a nivasi?”

The floorboards wavered, turning to water.

Nivasi.

His grandfather knew. He knew Cluck had brought a Paloma into their house.

“You think I don’t see what she is?” Pépère asked.

The floorboards swelled liked waves, ready to swallow Cluck.

“How long have you known?” he asked.

“Longer than you have.”

The rattled feeling inside Cluck sharpened into anger. “Then you should have told me.”

“And what would that have done?” his grandfather asked. “You found out. It made no difference.”

“If you had a problem with her being here, why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“I had no problem with her being here. I have many problems with her being with you.”

Cluck put a hand on the dresser, steadying himself.

“I taught you better than this,” his grandfather said.

“Whatever happened, she didn’t do it,” Cluck said. “They don’t even want her. They threw her out.”

“She’s the same blood.” Pépère almost yelled now. “You know nothing about that family.”

“Then tell me.” Cluck slammed his hand down on the dresser. The pills rattled in the bottle, a reminder like a sharp whisper that they had not been touched. “You tell me the plant did worse things than I know, but you won’t tell me what. You tell me I shouldn’t be with her but you won’t give me any reason better than her last name. What do I do with that?”

“If you find a nivasi you leave her where you find her.” His grandfather turned. “End it with her.”

“If you didn’t want me with her, why did you let her stay?”

“Because I wanted her to get you out of here.”

“What are you talking about?” Cluck asked.

“It wouldn’t have been long until someone figured out who she was,” Pépère said. “And you’re the one who brought her here. You’re the one who knew what she was. This family would throw you out for that the same as hers threw her out.”

The book-smell Cluck’s grandfather brought with him into every room he stayed in faded. The scent of Lace’s river, all wet reeds and sun on her body, faded. Nothing stayed but the dry earth smell of his own feathers.

“You wanted them to find out?” Cluck asked.

“I wanted them to find out you’d hired a Paloma,” Pépère said. “Not that you were going into rivers with her. If they knew that, if they knew what you were really doing, they’d kill you. I’m not going to let that happen. But if they’d thought she was only some girl you were looking after, they’d just throw you away like her family did to her.”

“And that’s what you wanted?” Cluck asked. “You wanted me to end up like her?”

“I didn’t want you to end up like me.” His grandfather threw his hand toward the window, the white square of his mouchoir almost brushing the glass. “Stuck here, following everyone else’s rules.”

“You didn’t have to do this,” Cluck said. They’d talked about this so many times. About Cluck going to community college, transferring to a four-year, then graduate school if he could get a scholarship like Pépère. That had been their plan since the day Pépère explained bird flight to Cluck, and Cluck had listened as closely as his youngest cousins did to fairy tales. “I didn’t plan on staying with the show forever. You knew that. I was always going to leave.”

“You mean the way I’ve left?” his grandfather asked.

His grandfather’s tired smile stung him.

“That’s not fair,” Cluck said, hating how the words sounded as soon as he said them. He’d meant it wasn’t fair to Pépère.

“You’re eighteen,” his grandfather said. “You finished the high school curriculum a year ago. When were you planning on leaving?”

“I’m saving for it,” Cluck said. “I need money before I can leave.”

“There’s never enough money.” Pépère cleared his throat into the handkerchief and then folded it as neatly as if it were clean. “You’ll be waiting forever.”

That smile on his grandfather’s face, sure and sad and bitter, killed any protest in him.

Cluck had never set a date to leave, never made plans to enroll in the fall.

His grandfather had been right about Lace too. Cluck had wanted to take Lace with him to the next county, keep her like a cat. He’d never thought of leaving with her, finding a place where neither of their names was the same as an oath broken. He’d just wanted to bring her with him to where this family was going next.

Lace’s was not Cluck’s freedom. He was her captivity. People did not leave this family, not for good. Margaux would be back eventually, a boyfriend or new husband with her. Whether Corbeau by blood or marriage or simply by working for the show, they did not leave. They stayed, and they followed the law set by pure black feathers.

“You know the way this family is,” Pépère said. “They pull you. They keep you.”

Any anger Cluck had sank beneath this understanding. Pépère wanted to take the choice from Cluck. He did not want Cluck to have to turn his back on this family, so instead he wanted them to turn their backs on him.

The fact that Pépère once had a house that did not move and a job that followed a steady clock, that he once didn’t have to listen to this family about whether he should see other women after Mémère died or whether he should put eggshells around the base of the lemon tree outside his kitchen window, these were all miracles, small but heavy. Miracles revoked when the plant took them from Pépère, and he had nowhere else to go.

“I was afraid you were never going to get out unless they made you,” Pépère said.

“If you wanted me to get out why do you care if I’m with her?” Cluck said, breathing on this small ember that made him wonder if Lace asked him, would he leave with her.

But Pépère just said, “You weren’t supposed to be with her that way. You were so protective of her I thought she was another Eugenie to you. A little cousin or sister.”

“And you just assumed I’d never feel anything for her?” Cluck asked. “You just banked on it?”

“You’ve never shown interest in any girls.” Pépère cleared his throat with a hard cough. “You’ve never shown interest in anyone.”

“Why do you think that is?” Cluck asked. “Everyone around here has made it pretty clear I’m supposed to stay away from any girls I’m not related to.”

“Then stay away from her.”

“Tell me why.”

Pépère coughed into the handkerchief again, trying three times before he got out, “She will ruin you.”

Cluck grabbed the prescription bottle off the dresser and forced it into his grandfather’s hand. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.” His grandfather threw the bottle down. “Because one of them ruined me.”

It cracked open. Half the pills scattered across the floor.

Cluck bent and picked out one left in the split bottle.

His fingers froze in the orange plastic, his grandfather’s words echoing, registering.

One of them.

But it was all of them. They’d all spread the lies about him.

Another coughing fit kept his grandfather from speaking.

He waited it out, and cleared his throat. “It was after your grandmother died.”

“What are you talking about?” Cluck asked.

“I was with one of them,” Pépère said, his words sharp as when Cluck couldn’t answer one of his questions about bird flight or earth metals. “I know about them better than you do.”

Cluck crouched over the prescription bottle. “A Paloma?” he asked, the words as weak as when he had to guess an answer to one of those questions Pépère thought he should’ve known. “You were with a Paloma?”

“And after, she claimed I forced her,” his grandfather said. “This is how that family is. They can get their own to say anything.”

He said it without hesitation, clean and even. These were facts etched into his life, as much as being let go from the plant.

He started coughing again, each inhale splintering the wood of the floorboards. The sound cracked Cluck open, knowing that he could have stopped this.

Cluck stood, a pill in his palm.

Pépère held a pointing hand between them, a warning, a sign that he would take nothing from that bottle. “This girl will do the same to you. That family will get her to do the same to you.”

“Who was the woman?” Cluck asked.

His grandfather hacked into the cotton square. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If it doesn’t matter, then tell me.”

His coughing got quieter, but still shook his frame. “End it.”

The words got into Cluck’s body. Their weight came down on him, but he couldn’t get his hands on the meaning, wet and slipping from his grasp.

Pépère looked at the door. “You.”

Lace froze at the threshold, eyes flitting between Cluck and his grandfather.

“I let you stay,” Pépère said. “I knew and I said nothing. And you went after him.”

“Pépère,” Cluck said.

His grandfather ignored him. “You will ruin his life,” he said to Lace.

Cluck saw Lace try to speak. Her mouth moved. But the sound sank under Pépère’s coughing.

Cluck reached out for his grandfather’s hand, to set the pill in his palm.

But his grandfather’s hand slipped down and out of reach, his body falling with it.

Cluck dropped to his knees, calling him back. Pépère. Alain. Any name he might answer to.

The handkerchief fluttered to the floor, the blood spray dense as the spotting on an umber-brown mushroom. The chemicals sharpening the air had needled Pépère’s smoke-worn lungs into forgetting they were for breathing.

Lace called. The sirens came for Alain Corbeau.

As they took him, Cluck opened his fingers and set his rosary in his palm. The string of dark, carved beads and the medal of Sara-la-Kali would be his grandfather’s guard against things left in the air.

Cluck got in the Morris Cowley and followed them.

But Pépère was faster than Cluck. He had always been faster. He left the whole world behind before Cluck even caught up to the ambulance.

Cluck got to the hospital in time for the doctor, shaking his head, to stop him in the hallway and tell him there was nothing they could do. That his grandfather’s lungs had forgotten how to breathe and his heart could not take it. That he was sorry. That Alain Corbeau was already gone.

A few minutes later the rest of his family was there, Clémentine sobbing so hard the echo vibrated through the waiting room.

A nurse set Alain Corbeau’s rosary into Cluck’s palms, the beads still warm from his grandfather’s fingers.

No todo lo que brilla es oro.

Not all that shines is gold.

He looked misplaced, an obsidian shard in a bowl of flour. In sunlight, his skin was the brown of unfinished wood, but here, the fluorescents stripped its warmth. His hair stood out against the hospital linoleum and walls. His dark trousers, inherited from the man he’d just lost, did not belong among the white coats and pastel scrubs.

The nurse who always wore purple came down the hall, eyes on the floor. She patted Cluck’s shoulder on her way by. Lace could tell by her face she knew he wouldn’t feel it. He didn’t react. The touch didn’t register.

Cluck poured his grandfather’s rosary from one hand to the other, then back. He stared down at the carved wooden beads. His thumb circled the saint’s medal.

The last words Lace had said to Alain Corbeau clung to her mouth. They left her tongue hot and dry. I love him. She knew she’d said it. She’d felt her mouth forming the shape of the words. Her throat hummed with the sound. But Alain Corbeau hadn’t heard it. Neither had Cluck.

She stood in front of him.

He saw her. The wavering of his eyes spread through her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She tried to hold him.

He set his hands on her upper arms. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”

Lace brushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. She would not hold him to words those rosary beads bled out of him.

“Don’t say anything,” she whispered, and tried to put her arms around him again. “Not now.”

He took a step back. The metal-and-earth scent of violet-black salt pulled away with him.

His face hardened. Losing Alain Corbeau had set him like clay.

“I can’t be with you, Lace,” he said.

His words fell against her lips, parched them like wind and dust. It stripped the words off her tongue.

I love him, her defense against everything Alain Corbeau thought she’d do to Cluck, was as weak as it was true.

He walked away. Back to the family who thought of him as a blur in a photograph. Back to the brother who threw him against walls to see if he’d break.

A few steps, and the distance opened like the height from a bough. It shook through her like a branch snapping.

She went after him.

A hand on her arm stopped her.

“Don’t,” Clémentine said, her eyes pink-rimmed. “Not now. He won’t listen. The only one he’d listen to now is gone.”

Clémentine left, biting the side of her thumb against sobbing.

Lace opened her hand. A black semiplume, the barbs striped deep red, crossed her palm. She lifted it to her face, and her breath trembled the afterfeather. A perfect copy of the plume still burned into her arm, first a curse, now the only thing she had to prove that he had ever touched her.

No puede ser más negro el cuervo que sus alas.

The crow cannot be blacker than its wings.

She went back to the Corbeaus’ trailers, the place she had never belonged and now belonged less. Cluck had been the one holding her passport. He had taught her the language and the landscape, shown her this country’s trees, the secret thrill of almost falling.

She took her suitcase, the clothes inside flecked with the black and red of Cluck’s lost feathers. She took her tail, the fabric stiff from drying. She folded up the wings Cluck made her.

The money her father had given her was still hidden in the lining of her suitcase. She slipped it out and used it to check into the cheapest motel in Almendro that was not the River Fork.

Her suitcase bounced on the bed, the lock clicking unhinged. She shoved it off the comforter. It thudded on the floor and flopped open.

A few black feathers floated out, like air bubbles underwater. They drifted toward the ceiling. Then one fell and brushed her fingers, the plume soft as the underside of Cluck’s hair.

First a dozen. Then a few dozen. Then hundreds more than she’d kept. More than could have fallen from Cluck’s head in his life.

Those black and jewel red plumes filled the air like dandelion fluff. The dark cloud rose up and then dispersed, raining red-streaked black over everything. She opened her hands to catch them.

Coverts spun down onto the bed. Secondaries wafted over the dresser. Some feathers were small, all down. Others were primaries, long as quill plumes, bigger than any that had grown in with Cluck’s hair. But they were all his, all marbled with his same red. Whether they’d fallen from him or not, they were his.

She went back to that old Craftsman house, ready to sneak into the blue and white trailer. But the few Corbeaus who saw her just nodded as she passed. Cluck must not have told them he didn’t want her there anymore. Not that they’d ever cared what he wanted.

She stole things no one but Cluck would miss. Scraps of wire. A few spools of the darkest thread she could find. Scrapped ribbon, red as a blood orange, leftover from trimming a dress.

The blank wing frame leaning on Cluck’s old mirror, bare as a February tree.

She’d never blamed Cluck for wearing his hair long enough to hide his feathers. She wouldn’t have wanted questions from strangers either. But if she left him alone with his family, without his grandfather, without her, they’d break him until he hated the red in his feathers as much as they did. He’d start thinking of it as a sickness that held onto him.

She wasn’t letting that happen. Even if he didn’t want her anymore, she wasn’t letting anyone, not even the Corbeaus, make him think the red that streaked every one of his feathers was a thing to hate.

Les petits ruisseaux font les grandes rivières.

Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

They kept saying his grandfather’s name. They would not listen to Cluck when he told them Pépère would not have wanted them saying his name.

His grandfather did not say Mémère’s name for weeks after her death, so her soul could break free from her bones. But now they all said his, throwing it around without thinking. If everyone kept saying Pépère’s name, his mulo would get tethered to his body, stuck as a balloon tied to a weight.

But they wanted to be French, all French. Cluck told them, “Don’t say his name out loud,” and they looked at him as though he’d spoken of broken mirrors. Like he was an old woman who wouldn’t let a black cat into the house.

They forgot they had Manouche blood of their own. But they had thrown it away with the rest of Romanipen.

His mother and her older sisters made the arrangements. A priest, a friend of Cluck’s aunt, would drive in from Linden for the service.

None of them knew that Cluck could have saved him, if he’d just thought for one minute about those pills instead of about a girl who loved water as much as he loved the sky.

The owners of the chemical plant offered to buy a plot in a cemetery on Almendro’s east border. They presented it as charity, not an admission. They said it was to express their condolences, to thank the family for the work Alain Corbeau had done for the plant decades ago.

It was their way of keeping the Corbeaus from wondering what killed him. The plant didn’t want them thinking about it too hard, considering if the fallout in the air had turned the wet surfaces of his lungs to blood.

“They’re being very generous,” his eldest aunt said, signing the papers. “We should be grateful.”

“They just want the body in the ground before a medical examiner can look at it,” Cluck said.

His eldest aunt’s husband slapped him and told him to show some respect.

Cluck held his palm to his right cheek. He breathed into the pain, knowing he deserved it. He’d failed, left those pills undisturbed in their bottle.

But that didn’t mean he had to like how they were taking the gadje’s blood money, crumpling up Romanipen like an old map. And they wanted respect out of him.

His aunts and his mother accepted the plot. Dax kept saying, “This is the best thing for him and for us,” as though he had made the decision.

Cluck only heard in time to see them sign the papers, God knew what they said.

It should not have been this way. The thought of Pépère in that shellacked wooden box, surrounded by this family who had made themselves gadje, sharpened the pain on Cluck’s cheek. How many times would they say his name during the service, and then over the next month?

Years ago, they would have set fire to his vardo, his wagon, all the dead man’s possessions lain inside. They would have decorated it with flowers and the dead man’s things, and then lit it. But Cluck couldn’t do that. He couldn’t torch the house or the blue and white trailer, set half the woods on fire along with it.

Cluck went back to the blue and white trailer, shut the door, took off his grandfather’s trousers and collared shirt. He could not burn everything for Pépère. But he could do this.

He found the pair of corduroys and the long-sleeved shirt his grandfather had bought him. He cut off the tags, pulled them on, bracing against the red of the shirt like it was cold water. They felt so unworn. But except for his underclothes and shoes, the things his grandfather had bought him were the only clothes he had that were his, and not once Pépère’s. A few shirts, a couple of pairs of pants, a jacket Cluck had kept but never put on.

The rest belonged to his grandfather. The suits and vests, the detachable collars on the ironed shirts, the dress pants. The things Pépère had asked Cluck to burn for him when he died.

He gathered them all, took them to the abandoned campground a quarter mile beyond the property, and threw them in a fire pit. The Corbeaus had left this tradition behind when they left le Midi. If Cluck did not do this for Pépère, no one else would.

He added fallen branches for kindling, then a lit match, and Alain Corbeau’s clothes caught.

Embers clung to the edges, dense as a band of stars. The fabric burned and thinned. It glowed translucent, and then crumbled to ash. The thin wood of the porcelain vines released the scent of their blue berries, and the lemon of the rampant wild roses turned to rind oil and pith.

He threw in white, pink-centered bitterroot. The red buds of pallid milkweed. Larkspur, violet-spindled. Paintbrush, red and sticky with resin; he tossed it in, and the fire flared white.

The wildflowers dissolved into cinders, and turned the air to perfume. His grandfather’s rosary weighted his pocket. He picked it out, and held it over the fire.

The moon and the firelight shone off the saint’s medal, the little copper image of Sara-la-Kali. The flames turned it hot so fast, the metal burned Cluck’s palm. He almost dropped it, but his fingers clutched at the wooden beads, and pulled it back.

He held the rosary to his chest. The metal’s heat spread through him as though he wore no shirt. He had lost the armor his grandfather’s clothes gave him. They had made him someone else. If he burned his hand or cut his arm, if his brother shoved him into the side of a trailer, the pain was not all his. He shared it with the years Pépère wore those clothes, stringing it out over decades until he barely felt it, the faint static of an untuned radio.

Now, if he let a girl touch him, it would be his body to feel it. He would not be able to thin out the feeling of her fingers. If she took his left hand and slid it under her blouse, it would be his own left hand, blighted, with ruined fingers. He would not be able to pretend his left hand was someone else’s, perfect and unbroken, or that it did not shudder to touch her more than his right.

His grandfather had not willed his right-handedness to him. It was not Cluck’s to inherit.

The rosary metal gave his body all its heat, and grew cool. The sting of that burn was only his. These clothes had no history to take the weight. Only his grandfather’s wish that he fear no color, not even the red of his own feathers. That he remember how red-winged blackbirds did not fear crows or ravens twice their size.

Cluck had not understood before why Pépère wanted him to wear his own clothes. But he understood now.

Pépère wanted Cluck to know the feeling of putting on something blank and new, clothes that did not speak of another man’s life. Pépère wanted him to grow a scent of his own, not offer his shoulders and hair to his grandfather’s smoke and wild chervil.

He wanted him to grow his own skin.

Cluck kissed the medal of Sara-la-Kali, and tucked the rosary into the pocket of his corduroys. He should have burned it with his grandfather’s clothes, but couldn’t. If he burned it, he would forget the feeling of the copper’s heat spreading through him. He would forget why he should wear his own clothes, and not another man’s. He would forget why he had burned Pépère’s suits, and he would want them back.

De malas costumbres nacen buenas leyes.

From bad customs are born good laws.

Lace kept her distance. She dressed in black anyway, the same dress she wore to her own grandfather’s funeral. She’d grown, so it was shorter now, ending three inches above her knees. It fit tight across her hips. But it was the only thing black she had with her in the motel room where feathers had rained down on everything.

She stood so the Corbeaus’ backs were to her. To anyone but them, she’d be a mourner who’d stepped away for a prayer or a cigarette.

Dew left the cemetery wet and green, lichen blooming over the stones. The drops caught the sun, scattering the light.

The morning was still cold enough to make her shiver. Cap sleeves exposed where wiring the feathers onto the wings had left her forearms scratched.

She almost didn’t recognize Cluck. He stood next to the open plot, hands at his sides. His jaw was still set, his face hard as the wood of his grandfather’s rosary beads. She’d gotten used to him in button-downs. Now he wore a dark red shirt, crew neck, not collared, and he stood out from all his family’s black suits.

The women, in black skirts down to their calves, looked over at him, but he did not turn his head, did not notice the glares. They must have taken it as disrespect, insolence. Worse, that he would dare to throw in their faces the color that stained his feathers.

If they knew him at all, they’d know better. His grandfather’s suits were the only ones he had, and maybe they reminded him too much of losing him. Maybe he couldn’t look at one of those suits long enough to put it on. Or he had, and that age-darkened mirror had cut into him, showing him how much he looked like a decades-old photograph of Alain Corbeau.

She stayed at the tree line, where the cemetery broke into the woods. She didn’t want Eugenie noticing her and asking why she was there.

She was there to pull Cluck to his feet and keep him there if he couldn’t stand. To make sure none of the pieces of him got lost if he broke. In case his mother, neat as a greenhouse tulip, failed to notice that he was not dust or cracked glass, and reached for a broom.

Lace would gather up those bits of him before they got swept up and thrown out. How he climbed trees as quick as a feral cat. The black salt smell of his hair and sweat. The way his wrecked hand moved over her body. How the sun and water dripped off his back, how warm it stayed even in the river.

A shadow cut through the pale sunlight. “Lace?” said her great-aunt’s voice.

Lace turned.

This Tía Lora was not the same as the Tía Lora Lace had left behind. She looked taken by a spirit, like a specter had spread through her limbs. It was a calm possession, not the thrashing rage of a vengeful ghost, but the deep-river stillness of Apanchanej, the water goddess who’d given the Paloma women their escamas.

Instead of her usual sweater and high-waisted skirt, Tía Lora wore a black dress, the cut plain and straight. It showed enough of her figure that she looked her age instead of Abuela’s. Her usual skirts started at the bottom of her rib cage and ended in the middle of her calves, making her seem the eldest among her sisters-in-law even when she was the youngest.

Her everyday braid showed mostly the silver. Now her hair was loose to her waist, the black streaks free. She wore no lipstick or mascara, but a layer of powder evened her color. Blush warmed her cheeks.

Though she had no children, Lora Paloma had always looked, to Lace, like a grandmother. But not now, not in this dress and this light. Now she was a woman retired men might wink at. They would take her out for early dinners and almost-late dancing. Twice a year—Valentine’s Day and her birthday—they would bring her twelve red roses, perfect and identical as folded napkins.

The sun made her glow like she was made of scales. Her skin shimmered with something a little like that pale iridescence.

Lace remembered Cluck telling her that iridescence was a dangerous thing. When birds or dragonflies grew into the glint of their own wings, they were weak, more open to damage than creatures that were plain colors. Lace wondered if Tía Lora had spent the last few days alone in her motel room, fragile and still, so she could emerge beautiful and made of light.

“Mijita?” her great-aunt asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Me?” Lace’s laugh was soft as the color on Tía Lora’s cheeks. “What are you doing here?”

Behind the veil of blush, her great-aunt’s color drained. She turned and walked into the woods.

“Tía Lora.” Lace went after her, her heart tight and raw.

Now her great-aunt knew where she’d been hiding. She’d picked up the oak and earth smell of the Corbeau boy’s feathers.

Lace caught up and stopped her. “Why are you here?”

Her great-aunt looked past her. Her eyes fell on the funeral. The wooden casket. The boy who stood by the gravesite. Even in corduroys and a plain shirt, instead of those passed-down suits, he looked like a young copy of the old man they were laying in the ground. A print left behind.

“Tía Lora,” Lace said. “Tell me.”

À bois noueux, hache affilée.

Meet roughness with roughness.

The priest from Linden spoke, but Cluck didn’t hear the words. He watched a crow pecking at the grass, feathers shining like slices of water. It kept his eyes from the varnished coffin, a burst of carnations and filler fern splayed over the top.

His aunts must have told the florist nothing but that they needed a funeral spray. Pépère never would have wanted the fuss of baby’s breath and these ruffled, bloodless flowers. If there had to be flowers, his family should have covered the wood with the kind of wild periwinkles Mémère let take over their back garden.

His family’s scorn whipped against him like wind-thrown branches. He didn’t care. They could think what they wanted. He’d burned as many of his grandfather’s things as he had the right and the stomach to. His family would have sold Pépère’s clothes, or let them wrinkle and yellow at the bottom of a wooden trunk.

Eugenie stood at his side, her small, set face daring her mother and father and older brother to say anything.

The crow beat its wings and lifted off. Cluck looked over his shoulder and watched it fly.

A shape at the tree line moved like a shadow. For that second, he thought he saw her, Lace Paloma in a black dress so short his mother would not have let her cross a church nave. Then she vanished.