The Weight of Feathers

This shadow of her was haunting him, reminding him that his grandfather would not have died if Cluck had not been so caught up in her. All he could do now was what he’d done, given her up, just like his grandfather wanted. Cluck wouldn’t be with the same kind of woman who had told lies about Pépère, and he wouldn’t trap Lace in this family.

He turned back toward the service, wanting to shake off that glimpse of her shape. He squeezed his eyes shut so tight that when he opened them, flecks of blue light swam in the air.

Clémentine’s eyes flashed toward Eugenie. Her Is he alright? face. It was the same for her cousins, for children, for a stray cat they fed that always held its head tilted to the side.

Eugenie squeezed his hand. “Ça va?”

He forced a nod, his tongue pressed against the back of his teeth.

After the service, most of the family did not speak to him. Those who did—an uncle, a few cousins—all told him how much he looked like his grandfather. A great-aunt made him bend down so she could kiss his forehead, and told him, “You are a picture of him.” A second cousin said, “I bet you’ll be just like him when you’re that old.”

What did they want him to take from these words? That if he missed Pépère, he could just check a mirror? That the more he aged, the closer he’d get to him? Like getting older would seal up the empty place.

Cluck knelt next to the grave, damp earth cooling the knees of his pants. He reached down a hand—the right, he made sure of it—and gathered a fistful of earth. It smelled of new roots and week-old rain. He would keep it with him until he could throw it in a well, the way his grandfather’s family had done for their dead since long before la République française existed. Another small thing to help Pépère flee this world. Cluck prayed, and told Pépère he would do this for him.

He finished praying, and walked away from the gravesite.

The sight of a man who was not one of them stopped him. He wore a navy suit, like he had in the hospital, one too nice for anyone who lived here. A suit not made for mourning.

A risk manager, Eugenie had called him. A man here to disperse the few protestors left as though they were rabbits. To take this town’s silence not as fear for their jobs, but as assent. He would ignore the families who depended on the plant workers. He would ignore the town’s unease that if too many of them protested, if they got too loud about safety standards, the plant would just pull out of Almendro. He’d ignore their dread about how it would gut the town, a worry so sharp it made the air hum.

The risk manager didn’t see any of that. His job existed because Pépère’s did not.

The man shook Dax’s hand with both hands, gripping with the right, patting with the left. A business handshake.

Cluck stood in the man’s path, blocking the way to his mother and aunts and uncles.

“What are you doing here?” Cluck said in a low voice.

“You’re Alain Corbeau’s grandson,” the risk manager said.

Cluck held the handful of dirt tighter. A few grains slipped between his fingers. “Don’t say his name.”

The man put on his best condolence face. He must have rehearsed it. The mouth was too tight, the eyes too pinched. “Alain was a great man.”

Cluck packed the earth against his palm, perspiration turning the outer layer to mud. First his full name, and now just the first. Worse than speaking his grandfather’s name, this man spoke as though he knew him. He wasn’t even old enough to have seen him checking gauges and managing cleaning procedures.

“Please,” Cluck said. “Don’t say his name.”

But the man didn’t understand, and went on with his speech about how vital Alain Corbeau was to the plant “back then,” how Alain’s dedication to his work inspired those around him, that Alain Corbeau would be remembered fondly as part of the Almendro community.

He used Pépère’s name so many times the words sounded like a printed obituary. He repeated it, full or first, over and over, until Cluck could hear his grandfather’s soul screaming back toward this world, a meteor of pure nickel and iron.

Cluck had already betrayed Pépère by loving a Paloma so hard he forgot to look after his own grandfather. He could not let this go.

“Anyone who worked with Alain Corbeau speaks highly of him,” the man said. “I want you to know that.”

Cluck’s left hand flew. It hit the man in the jaw, closed-fist, his right palm still holding the handful of Pépère’s grave.

The man stumbled, holding his hand to his face. The practiced sadness slipped out of place like the lid off a jar.

The pain of a jammed finger throbbed through Cluck’s hand. It hadn’t faded by the time the police came for him.

His family’s murmurs and his mother’s shouting all faded under the crisp flapping of the crow’s wings.

The soreness in Cluck’s left hand gave way to the weight in his right. With as many times as the risk manager had said Pépère’s name, Cluck needed, even more, to leave this handful of earth in a well.

“Please,” Cluck said as they tried to force his wrists behind his back. “There’s something I have to do first.” He had to do this one thing right for Pépère.

He would not open his right hand. If he did not reach the well, no one would do it in his place. His family would call these things old superstitions. They would leave Pépère held to the earth like a moon.

Cluck fought their hold. “No.” But they clicked the locks into place.

He felt small hands under his, taking the earth.

Eugenie stepped into his sight, the soil filling her palms. She held it in both hands, cupping it in front of her like she’d caught a finch. She was so little, so quick, that she’d slipped behind him and away again before the police could think to stop her.

“Please,” Cluck told her. “There’s a well out by County Road 27.”

“By the almond orchard,” she interrupted him. “I know. I’ll bring it.”

Her hands had been raining petals onto their audiences for years. They knew when to stay so closed it looked like she held nothing, and when to open.

“Nais tuke,” he said as they pulled him away. Thank you.

She smiled. “Always.”

Cluck breathed out until he’d emptied his lungs. He stopped fighting, and let them take him.

El amor es ciego.

Love is blind.

Tía Lora told her not to go back. This was what she asked in return for the things she told her.

“There is nothing for you there, mija,” she said, making Lace drink borraja tea to calm her, the honey taste of the flowers helping the bite of the leaves go down.

But Lace went anyway, her hands prickling with the truth of what happened the night the lake swallowed the trees, a truth only she and Lora Paloma knew.

And how Justin, Oscar, and Rey could have called Cluck a chucho, a word that meant not just wild or stray but mutt. Why Cluck’s gitano blood showed so much more in him than in his mother and brother. This truth half the Corbeaus knew. They just hadn’t bothered to tell Cluck.

Lace didn’t find him in the trailers. She searched the mourners in the Corbeaus’ kitchen and dining room. But she did not see Cluck.

She didn’t see Dax either. So she threw open his bedroom door without knocking.

Dax looked up from a writing desk, hand paused over a ledger like his mother’s.

“Where is he?” Lace asked.

“Who?” Dax asked.

“Cluck,” she said, yelling more than she meant to.

“Where do you think? He’s in a holding cell.”

She held her hands to her sternum, her great-aunt’s truths stinging her through her dress. “What?”

“He hit one of the men from the plant. Some lawyer or actuary, I don’t know. Eugenie didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Lace said. She hadn’t seen Eugenie.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get by without him. Call tonight is the usual time.” He went back to writing.

Lace set her back against the wall. “Dammit, Cluck,” she said under her breath. He’d never hit anyone in his life, and he had to start with a lawyer.

“Stop calling him that,” Dax said. “He’s not a chicken.”

Her shoulder blades pressed into the wallpaper. “And you’re just leaving him there.”

“Suis-je le gardien de mon frère?” Dax asked.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Genesis four-nine.” He took a Bible off the bookshelf and handed it to her. “If you’re going to keep working for us, you’ll need to learn a little French.”

The Bible was in English. She wondered if it belonged to him, or Nicole, or whoever rented them this house.

She turned to the right chapter and verse. She only knew one word, frère, but it was enough to tell her the right part of the verse. Am I my brother’s keeper? The line in scripture that had let men pass the buck for thousands of years.

She shut the Bible and threw it on the desk. “Did you know? This whole time, did you know?”

“Know what?” He put the Bible back on the shelf.

She set her hands on the edge of the desk. “Where were you in all this?”

He kept working.

She grabbed the pen from his fingers.

His hand shot out toward hers, gripping it. “Let it go.”

She tried pulling her hand back. Trying to twist free made his hold worse.

His thumb pressed back on her index and third fingers. “Let go.”

She doubled over the desk. Her fingers would not give up the pen. A spot of ink bled onto Dax’s palm.

“Stop,” she choked out.

She tried to let the pen go, but now he was smashing her hand into it. The pressure built in her joints. If he kept bending her fingers back, the bones would give and crack.

“Let it go,” he said, low as a whisper. The alcohol of his cologne stung the back of her throat.

Her hand trembled, her mouth trying to make the word Please. If he kept holding her this hard, twisting her knuckles, he would break both her fingers in one snap, like Cluck’s hand, ruined by a single thing he would never tell her. Jousting or bullfighting. Lies more ridiculous than his fake names.

All those stories about car doors and falling out of trees.

Genesis, fourth chapter.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Cain’s answer when God asked where Abel was.

Dax had wrecked the hand Cluck thought he should never use.

The numbers floated through her brain like math on her father’s worksheets. Cluck was eighteen. It had happened nine years ago, when he was nine years old. Dax couldn’t have been older than fourteen. How had his fingers held that kind of brutal will?

This was the sin of mothers and fathers, thinking their children were too young, too much children, to be cruel. Oscar and Rey weren’t any older when they joined their uncles shooting crows.

Lace’s stomach clenched and then gave. The borraja tea came up. The acid burned her throat, and she coughed it out. It sprayed Dax’s suit. He jumped back and let her hand go.

She dropped the pen and ran out of the room, hunching her shoulder to wipe her mouth on her sleeve.

Nicole Corbeau stepped into the hall. She held out a hand to stop Lace. “Tu couve quelque chose?”

The water in Lace’s eyes beaded and fell. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. “How could you lie to him like this?”

The blue of Nicole Corbeau’s eyes lightened, like water draining from a bathtub. She knew what Lace meant. Who him was. What this was.

“How could you let him believe all this?” Lace asked. Her voice would have broken into screaming if she’d had the air. She heard the full, heavy call of arundo reeds creep into the words, their breath holding up her weak voice. She didn’t care. Let Nicole Corbeau hear it. Let her know Lace was a sirena who would not keep Corbeau lies locked under her tongue.

Nicole Corbeau pressed on Lace’s back to get her into a side room.

She shut the door. “I didn’t decide it. My sisters did.”

“But you went along with it,” Lace said.

“Dax’s father left. He wouldn’t marry me. You don’t know what that means in this family.” She folded her thin arms over the black linen of her dress. “They decided this was my penance for having the son I wanted. Being forced to raise another who wasn’t mine.”

Two bastardos who would think they shared a vanished father.

“Dax doesn’t know?” Lace asked.

Nicole’s laugh was small but sharp. “He thinks he remembers when I was pregnant. He was five. You can convince a child that age of anything.”

“And your father?” Lace asked. “How’d you convince him? He agreed to this?”

“This whole town called him a rapist. He thought if he raised le cygnon himself the name would brand him too. That the scandal would follow le cygnon his whole life.”

Le cygnon.

“You can’t even say his name, can you?” Lace asked.

Nicole Corbeau could not have known then that Cluck would turn out left-handed. That, as he grew, the black cygnet down would give way to red-streaked feathers. That he would look so much like Alain Corbeau, el gitano. She hated him for all these things, but most of all she hated him because she could not love him as she loved her own perfect bastardo, the son she wanted even if his father did not stay.

“Who told you?” Nicole asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Does he know?”

“No,” Lace said. “He doesn’t.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Would you care if I did? If I tell him, he’ll hate you. He’ll leave. And then you’ll never have to see him again.”

A wince tightened Nicole’s face and stiffened her shoulders. For a second Lace felt sorry for the woman Nicole Corbeau had been back then. A young mother shamed for having a child but no husband. A woman not much older than Lace, who had no more power to fight the law of her family than las sirenas had to defy Abuela.

Like Tía Lora, Nicole Corbeau paid for having a son when she was not married. But while Tía Lora’s punishment was losing a son, Nicole Corbeau’s was being given one she did not want.

Lace sobbed into the air, her hands too wet to take it. She cried not just for Cluck and for Tía Lora, but for the young woman who had hardened into the Nicole Corbeau who now stood in this room. The salt of her tears seeped into her burn, dragging through like a safety razor slipping. “Did you ever want him?”

“I already had the son I wanted,” Nicole Corbeau said.

There was no sharpness in her face, no cruelty. She said it as plainly as whether the eggs this week were good or not.

“You could’ve gotten rid of him months ago,” Lace said. “He’s eighteen. You could’ve kicked him out on his last birthday. There wouldn’t even have been paperwork.”

“It’s not up to me to decide where he goes,” Nicole said. “It never has been. This family keeps him here to teach him, to help him be something better than he was born. He is our blood. It’s up to us to look after him.”

“Is that what you all think you’re doing?” Lace threw the door open.

“Where are you going?” Nicole Corbeau asked.

“If you won’t get him out, I will,” Lace said.

“Take him. Avec ma bénédiction.”

The words hooked into Lace, pulling her so she almost turned around. They almost got her to talk back, to say That’s what you want, isn’t it? So he won’t be your problem anymore? So you all won’t have to contain how evil he is?

But she did not stop. She did not stop when she reached the back door, or the dirt road, or the paved street. She did not stop until she reached the chemical plant’s fence line.

The few remaining protestors sent their chants through the chain link. She wove through, keeping her eyes off the mixing tanks, so the sight of them would not stab into her cheek.

She slipped her fingers into the fence. “Hey.” She rattled the chain link and yelled over the protestors’ chanting. “I want to see your lawyer. Your actuary. Whatever you call him. Whoever showed up at the cemetery this morning, I want to see him.”

A security guard approached the fence, his steps slow, one eye half-shut. He was a younger one, still getting the bearing of the job. He had the kind of extra weight that made him look soft, but that heft gave his arms power. Lace knew because of Justin. His body had that same look, and Lace had seen the blood and bruises he left.

“He came here to handle people, didn’t he?” Lace yelled, shaking the fence. “Tell him to get out here and handle me.”

If she had still been with her family’s show, Abuela would have fired her, swept all her things into an empty suitcase like she had Licha’s. Las niñas buenas did not stand outside fences, squawking and making shows of themselves.

But what had all this behaving gotten Tía Lora? A lover she had not been allowed to see. A lie that ruined the one man who’d been kind to her. And a son she’d barely gotten to hold. A boy who grew up thinking his father was a man he had never known, and his mother a woman who considered him nothing more than a weak copy of his older brother.

The security guard watched her, the dilemma pulling at that half-closed eye. She could see it twisting the muscles at the corners of his mouth. Should he escort her off the property? Throw out the girl the chemical plant cooked? Right now she was nothing. A number, an injury, an item so low on the lawyers’ list she drifted off the bottom of the page. But if some in-town reporter caught the story and got it into the next day’s paper, the bad publicity might stick.

The red heart on Lace’s cheek already showed. She turned her head so it was all he could see.

She lowered her voice. “Get him out here, or I start talking.”

He knew what she meant. She’d hidden from the papers and local station camera crews, first with her family, then with the Corbeaus, los gitanos the reporters wouldn’t get near. But she didn’t have to. Some county paper could print her picture, the garnet on her cheek showing up even in black-and-white.

The guard nodded to another guard. She waited five minutes, and a man in a newly pressed suit came out to the fence line. He held an ice pack to the side of his face.

She could smell his aftershave through the fence, the sharp resin of synthetic pine. His hair, neat and styled, made her think of leather briefcases, dry cleaners, first class red-eyes.

She pointed at his cheek. “Luc Corbeau gave you that, right?”

A sneer wrinkled his upper lip. He smoothed it, and said nothing.

“Are you pressing charges?” she asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

He started walking away, giving the security guard a look of don’t let this bother me again.

“Actually it is.” Lace held the fence and stood on her toes. “Because I want to know if I’m going to the county paper tomorrow morning.”

He stopped, the heel of one polished shoe lifted midstep.

The chanting pressed into her back.

“They’re afraid now,” she said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs. But if the news crews come in, they’re gonna find out what everyone’s too scared to say.”

The plant should have installed an overfill pipe. Cluck knew it. This man must have known it. And he must have known of a dozen other little mistakes. A disregarded pressure gauge. A broken thermometer. Pipes that hadn’t been cleaned. Slip blind procedures skipped. A shift worker so bleary from overtime he could barely read the numbers.

These things would come out. The question was how fast, and if Lace would help.

The man turned around. “Nobody knows who you are.”

“You’re right,” she said. “And this isn’t a story. It’s two lines in anything but the local paper. But it could be bigger. It will get bigger. All that noise is coming. You know that. So my question is, do you want me to be part of it?” She turned her face again to show her cheek.

“I don’t have time for this.” The man turned his back, shaking her off through that chain-link fence.

All Lace had left was a thing that was not hers to tell. What Lora Paloma had figured out with Alain Corbeau’s help. Not because Tía Lora wanted justice for her dead husband, but because she did not want the sinking of a grove of trees to destroy the family she now called hers.

Alain Corbeau was the one man who could have told Tía Lora if she was right, and who might have wanted to see the fighting end as much as she did. He was the one Corbeau who, years ago, did not travel with his family’s show.

The mineral extraction work being done under the lake. Alain Corbeau had found the records that proved the lake swallowing the trees was an act neither of God nor of either family, but the fallout from the crumbling of a salt dome beneath the lake.

The plant’s owners had sunken a well into that salt dome. Shoddy work, and orders for more salt faster, made the wall of the well cave. Rock slipped down into the empty space, trapped air bubbled toward the surface, and the lake opened up. A sinkhole took out all those trees before the water settled. The river’s sudden roughness, the thing Lace’s family blamed on the Corbeaus’ magia negra, had been from the force and debris off the collapsed lake bed.

All of this an act of no one but the chemical plant’s owners, who’d covered it all up so well that the whole town thought it was a natural disaster, a tragedy no different than a lightning-strike fire.

But before Alain Corbeau could steal or copy the records that would prove what he and Lora knew, the plant managers had found out and fired him. Then he had nothing to show he was more than a madman with his theories.

Tía Lora didn’t have those records. Neither did Lace.

All she had was lying.

“Maybe you wanna talk about the sinkhole,” Lace said through the fence.

The shift in the man’s walk gave him away. He stopped in the middle of his stride, and turned around. His eyes got tight.

“You don’t know anything,” he said.

“And you don’t know how much of a pain in your ass I can be,” she said. “You really want to find out?”

The man’s face relaxed, but there was no more of that smirk, that ridicule. The man may not have believed her threat had any more weight than a string of paper dolls. But he knew the way to make it not matter. It was a small thing to let Luc Corbeau go.

He could make her go away, and he knew it.

Lace pushed herself off the fence. “Get him out.”

De lo perdido, lo que aparezca.

From what is lost, what comes back.

Her toothbrush cleared out the bitter taste of starflower leaves. But her stomach didn’t settle.

She thought of the Corbeaus in that rented Craftsman house. They carried with them so many years of lying Lace waited for the clapboards to split.

She put on the white wings Cluck had made her, tied the ribbons under her breasts, and waited in the blue and white trailer.

When Cluck opened the door, he didn’t look surprised to see her. He didn’t look happy either.

“What the hell did you do?” he asked.

She got up from the built-in bed.

He threw the trailer door shut. “You went to the plant?”

She set her hands on his upper arms, checking that he was all there. The red shirt and brown corduroys she’d never seen him in before that morning. His hair that looked neat at the funeral but uncombed now. The three fingers Dax had broken.

“These aren’t the kind of people you want to deal with.” He put his hands on the side of her face, the heat of his palm stinging her burn.

She didn’t stop him.

He gripped the back of her neck. “You know that, right?” He didn’t raise his voice. Today had hollowed him out too much. He didn’t have the sound left to yell.

“I don’t care.” She dug her hands into his back. “I wanted you out.”

He kissed her, hard. She kissed him back, almost biting his lip.

His hands found the feathers on her back. “What are you doing in these?”

She made him stand in front of the mirror, eyes closed, like he’d done to her. She tied to his body the things she’d made. Those hundreds of black and red feathers threaded to the empty wing frame, filling in the wire shapes until they were thick as crow’s plumage.

She fastened the red ties to his shoulders and across his chest.

The feeling of the ribbon against his shirt made him open his eyes.

She watched his face in the mirror, his eyes half-closing again, his mouth a little open. He took in the spread of black feathers. Red streaks wove through, like the petals of French marigolds on dark water.

She stood behind him, her fingers tracing the wingspan. “I borrowed the frame,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He met her eyes in the mirror.

“I just tried to copy what you did on mine.” She moved between him and the mirror. “It’s nowhere near as good as your work, and they’ll probably fall apart in about two days. But I had the feathers.”

He held her against the mirror, the hollow shafts of the white peacock feathers pressing into her back. His breath fell hot on her mouth. “Why?”

The night she stole the thread and ribbon and the wire frame, it was to get him back. But now she’d tied them to him so Tía Lora would know him, so she would not have to ask if this was the boy.

Lace hadn’t told Tía Lora she would do this, but her great-aunt would know. The boy in the black wings, brushed red, was the one Lora Paloma needed to tell the things she’d told Lace. Lace was afraid if her great-aunt had to ask, if she heard herself say the question—Is this him? Is this the boy?—she’d shrivel back into herself and never speak.

Lace held her hand to Cluck’s chest, so neither of them would close the space between their lips again. “There’s someone you need to see.”

She led him across the woods, both of them still wearing their wings, a shared sign to anyone who wanted to look that they would not let this go on. All these lies would not bleed into two more decades.

The motel hallway was empty. Tía Lora waited behind an unlocked door, fidgeting with a handful of thread and glass beads.

A flicker of recognition passed between her and Cluck.

Lace shut the door. Cluck and Tía Lora stood in the middle of the room, him looking a little down, her a little up.

Tía Lora lifted a hand to his cheek, as though she could know him by the grain of his skin.

His wings made him so much bigger than Lace’s great-aunt. He loomed over her like an archangel. He must have felt it too. He untied the wings from his body, took them off, and laid them on the bed.

Lace knew she should leave them alone. But if she did not stay, did not needle her great-aunt into repeating the things she’d told her this morning, the truth would sink under the river silt, and never be found.

So Lace stood at the threshold, guarding the door, where Tía Lora could see her.

Tía Lora hesitated, and Lace gave her a nod, a look of go on, tell him. Lora Paloma had been silent so long. A few more minutes would be too much. She would wither like a crepe paper poppy.

Tía Lora set the glass beads on a nightstand and made Cluck sit on the edge of the bed. She sat next to him.

Cluck set his forearms on his knees, looking at the patterned carpet. Lace could not hear most of their words, especially her great-aunt’s soft, low voice. But she knew what Tía Lora was saying. She had said it all to Lace this morning. And now she told it to Cluck like he was small, and it was un cuento de hadas, some fairy story, dark and sharp.

Tía Lora had been with a man named Alain, a small romance rooted as much in shared loneliness as love, grown from their shared search for the truth about the salt under the lake and the sinkhole that took the trees. They still did not know what to do with what they knew but could not prove when Lora found out she was pregnant.

That morning, Tía Lora had told Lace how her sisters-in-law had whispered. Imagine, at her age? A forty-five-year-old widow? You’d think God would have closed her womb, sí? Dime, which cabrón you think did it? Maybe that mechanic in Calaveras? You saw how he looked at her. ¿Te lo crees? A man losing his head over Lora.

But Tía Lora didn’t tell Cluck these things. Instead she told him how during those months she did not speak, would not say who her child’s father was no matter how many Palomas asked her, until her time came, the day her son was born. No one asked who the father was again. They knew. In the place of hair her son was born with the dark, soft down of a black cygnet.

“Those feathers,” Tía Lora said. “It could have been any Corbeau.” She held her right hand balled in her left, and then switched, back and forth. “I don’t know how they knew it was Alain.”

Lace could guess. If anyone had seen them together, even once, Abuela would have heard about it, the same as she’d heard about Cluck holding Lace in his arms the night of the accident, her dress in pieces.

But Lace didn’t speak, afraid if she startled them Tía Lora would stop talking and Cluck would leave, spooked like that Camargue colt. So she stayed quiet.

Tía Lora kept kneading her fingers, holding one hand closed inside the other. She told Cluck that before she had even gotten to hold her son, the Palomas brought him to the gitanos who grew feathers in their hair. They left him with them, the black down bearing witness that This, this is clearly yours.

Neither Paloma nor Corbeau knew that once his down fell away and his semiplumes came in with his hair, they would be streaked red.

“They said it was because I was bad,” Cluck said, more to his own hands than to Tía Lora. He did not lift his eyes from the carpet. There was so much in Tía Lora’s cuento de hadas, so many things he had to hold in those hands, and this was the one small thing he could take in right now, the reason for the wicked color in his feathers. He held it, turned it over like a river stone, invisible except to him. “Like how I’m left-handed.”

Tía Lora did not have to ask to know he had taken it as truth, undeniable as the red itself. She put a hand on his arm, to tell him she did not believe it. He flinched, but then Lace saw his muscles settle into the feeling of her hand as she told him the Palomas had given her a choice. Leave with her new son, her little cuervo, leave the only family she had left, or give him to los gitanos.

They did not need to tell her that she could not go with the Corbeaus, with Alain and their new son. She was a Paloma, by marriage and by name, and the Corbeaus would no sooner take her as they would adopt a fish from the river.

“But why didn’t you leave with my grandfather?” Cluck asked. “He would’ve. I know he would’ve.”

Tía Lora told Cluck that Alain had never loved her the way she had loved him, that she did not want to force him to be with her because he had made her pregnant. She did not want him growing to hate their child for it.

“He wasn’t like that,” Cluck said.

But it was more than this, Tía Lora told him. She had seen the feud building between the Palomas and the Corbeaus. She’d seen the fights, the threats, the sabotage, and how the accident had deepened all of it. She knew a child born between a Corbeau and a Paloma, even a Paloma by marriage, would not bring the families together.

It would just destroy the child. Both families would reject him, leaving him with no one but a mother, a father who stayed out of obligation, and all those voices telling him he was worth nothing. Or each family would pull on him so hard, wanting him to choose their side, that he would break apart.

So Tía Lora had kept her pregnancy from Alain, avoiding him when her clothes could no longer hide her shape. But when her son was born with down for hair, and the Palomas set the choice before Tía Lora, she thought the better life for her son would be one surrounded by others who grew feathers. A family who could care for him better than she could alone.

But the Palomas saw her wavering, heard her wailing in her sleep like a cow with its calf torn away, so to save her from her weakness, they made sure that every Corbeau would hate her, including Alain. Especially Alain.

The Palomas told everyone close enough to hear that she cried out in her sleep because this pain, this bleeding in her womb, was all because a Corbeau had forced her. He was un violador, and he would pay.

The police took Lora Paloma’s wailing and bleeding as proof of the story her family told. All the crying and the things dripping into her through the IV kept her from hearing their words, and speaking her own.

She would have said she loved Alain Corbeau, even if the only woman he would ever love was a wife he’d lost years earlier. And when the cloud the IV had left around Tía Lora cleared like haze burning off a morning, when she heard what the Palomas had done, she went to the police herself.

She did not tell Cluck that her womb had still been swollen and sore as she waited in the station. She did not tell him about the feeling of blood collecting inside her like rain. These were things for Lace to know, not her son, not a boy becoming a man.

But she did tell him how she made sure the police knew there was no violador, that she had wanted Alain Corbeau more than she had ever wanted the dead man who was once her husband. If her family would not let her have her son, they would let her have this, lifting the weight of the truth off her tongue.

She kept Alain Corbeau from jail. But even if she’d knocked on every door in Almendro and told them the truth, it wouldn’t have kept him inside the chemical plant’s fence line. They caught him looking at records he should not have seen, files about the lake and the salt mining, and they let him go.

Along with his job, he lost any chance of proving what happened the night the trees sank, so the hate between the Palomas and the Corbeaus burned bright, and Lora and Alain had no breath to blow it out or water to drown it. The town shunned Alain Corbeau, el gitano y el violador. And he never spoke to Lora again. She never had the chance to tell him that she hadn’t been the one to tell those lies, to call him un violador.

Cluck stood up. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“It doesn’t matter what they think of him,” Tía Lora said. “You knew him.”

He turned away. “I don’t care.” Cracks came into his voice. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“Lucien Corbeau, sit down,” Lora Paloma said.

Lace held the door frame. She had never heard Tía Lora raise her voice. Even once when Lace tried to run into the street after a cat, her great-aunt had only gripped her arm and whispered, “No, mija. This is how you die.”

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

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

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

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

He was your father, and I am your mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He straightened his shoulders, holding up those dark wings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You okay?” Lace asked.

“No,” he said. “No. Not really.”

“Where are you going?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le loup retourne toujours au bois.

The wolf always goes back to the woods.

“Cluck?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went with him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wouldn’t have thought that.”

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

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

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

“Lace.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Lace said. “She doesn’t.”

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

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

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

“She hates me. She could’ve said no.”

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

“Good point,” he said.

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

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

Cluck laughed, the noise slight but sudden.

“What?” Lace asked.

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

“Really?”

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

Lace gripped Cluck’s arm, stopping him.

“What?” he asked.

A figure stepped out from behind a tree. Cluck recognized the broad shape.

“You back for more, chucho?” the figure said. He hadn’t gotten close enough for Cluck to make out his face, but the word he remembered. Chucho. The two syllables called up the feeling of getting kicked in the stomach, his grandfather’s collar coming undone.

Two more figures stepped forward, their silhouettes showing against the trees. Lace’s cousins, the ones from the liquor store.

Now his wings told them he was a Corbeau.

“And you brought your girlfriend this time, huh?” one asked.

If they knew she’d been with a Corbeau, they might kill her, treat her like a fallow deer a wolf had gotten its teeth into.

“Run,” Cluck said, low enough that the three of them wouldn’t hear.

But the break in his voice betrayed him, told her that if she ran, he wouldn’t.

“No,” she whispered back. “Justin,” she said to the biggest one.

But Justin didn’t hear her, or didn’t care.

They didn’t recognize her. Her makeup was too heavy, covering the red heart on her cheek. In the dark, they didn’t see past her wings.

Cluck walked up to their line. He wasn’t taking anyone, Paloma or Corbeau, standing in front of him anymore.

“Get out of my way,” he said.

The oldest one laughed. The other two went at him.

Lace’s cousins had not been the ones to call the police about Pépère. But their parents or grandparents might have brought the police to the hospital, where the officers accepted Lora Paloma’s writhing and sobbing as a statement. Lace’s cousins carried the blood of everyone who kept him from his mother.

This time when they hit him, he hit back. Every time one of their fists went into him, his hands returned the blow. Feathers rained from his wings. The salt of his own blood dried out his mouth. This was what his hate could press against. Their hate, and the pain in his own body.

Lace called their names, trying to pull them off Cluck. One tugged on her dress to get her off him, and the fabric tore, exposing her slip. Cluck shoved him and he fell. She kicked another one, and he backhanded her to flick her away. The force knocked Lace’s right wing out of place. Cluck hit him in the jaw, a clean copy of how he’d gotten the risk manager.

Lace gripped the biggest one by his shirt collar and yelled into his face, “Justin, look at me!”

Her yelling, almost breaking into screaming, made her cousins freeze. The two younger ones let go of Cluck.

Their stares all met on her face. They stepped back like she could burn them.

“Lace?” the biggest one said, the word choked like Lace had her hand around it.

She looked at Cluck. “Run.”

Cluck grabbed her hand to make her go with him. The fildefériste blood in him shook awake. The wind shifted, the air sharpened with the scent of iodine. He had never been to the towns in Provence where his great-grandparents strung their wires. He had never walked a tightrope between a town’s tallest tree and steeple. He had never waved to the crowd gathered in front of a village church. But these trees were his wires. He could climb higher and faster than anyone in the show.

They’d hide in the cottonwood tree. They could get high enough in the branches that no one could reach them.

He let Lace get ahead of him so he could see her, make sure she didn’t turn back. The trees blurred. The moon barely reached the ground. His lungs cramped and stung, but he told her to keep going. The undergrowth crunched and snapped under their steps, the sounds scattering night birds.

But Cluck didn’t find the cottonwood trunk standing alone. Another familiar shape broke its line.

Cluck and Lace stopped.

Dax stood near the tree’s base, still in his funeral suit. He would have heard the fight with Lace’s cousins, the noise in the stretch of woods both the Corbeaus and the Palomas considered theirs.

He took in Lace’s ripped dress, her bent wing, her tangled hair. Then he looked at Cluck. “What did you do?”

The pain between Cluck’s ribs brightened and spread.

It didn’t matter if Dax knew the truth, that this town thought Alain Corbeau had raped Lora Paloma. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, Dax had been waiting for years for Cluck to live up to his left-handedness and the red in his feathers. Cluck was le petit démon, the blighted thing that would ravage this family if Dax didn’t keep him caged.

Something had lit the green in Dax’s eyes. Cluck being with Lace. The white wings that might have been enough to make Dax realize she was a Paloma. The black and red wings on Cluck. Dax wondering if Cluck had been the one to tear Lace’s dress.

Cluck got in front of Lace. He’d made her part of this, so he had to stay between her and Dax.

But Dax didn’t go after Lace. He grabbed Cluck’s collar and shoved him against the cottonwood. The impact went through Cluck’s body. He fought to hold his breath in his lungs.

“You never listen, do you?” Dax hit him in the jaw.

The force rattled down through Cluck’s neck.

“I told you not to.” Dax got him again, left temple this time. “And you did it anyway.”

A seam of blood dripped down Cluck’s cheek. It stung like a spray of hot water.

He tried to get Lace’s eye, to tell her to run even though he couldn’t. Dax wanted him. He was the traitor, le bâtard. The evil thing that would ruin his family. If he let Dax pin him against this tree, hit him until he had to hold Cluck up by his collar, Lace could get away before Dax remembered she was there.

El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste.

He who wants the sky must pay.

Lace saw the look, the flick of Cluck’s eyes telling her to leave. She ignored it. Blood streaked his face. It stained his collar. If she left him here, Dax would kill him.

So she kept searching the dark ground for anything to stop Dax. She wasn’t big enough to pull him off Cluck. If she tried, she’d make it worse, irritating Dax like a wasp. She needed something big enough to knock him out.

The sound of Dax’s fist hitting Cluck’s skin again made her stumble. Her hands found a branch, heavy and knotted. The bark felt rough as raw quartz. The rain had eaten at the wood. It wouldn’t have fallen if the chemical hadn’t weakened the bough.

“You always have to do something, don’t you?” she heard Dax say.

She picked up the branch and steadied her grip to go at him.

“I don’t know what you did,” Dax said. “But everything bad in this family starts with you, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Cluck said.

The hint of a laugh in his voice made her look up.

She stopped, the branch still in her hands.

“It does.” Cluck half-smiled, blood trickling from his lip.

Dax stared at him, fist frozen at his side.

The fear left Cluck’s face. He opened his eyes, the moon a white fleck in each iris.

Yeah, it does. Those three words, accepting the things his family hated about him. Instead of letting them leave a thousand little cuts in him, he sharpened them himself, held them like knives.

It wasn’t true. Everything bad in these trees and that water lived there before Cluck took his first breath.

But Dax could think anything he wanted. The truth didn’t belong to him anymore.

Cluck turned his shoulder, getting free of Dax’s grip. He drove his fist into the side of Dax’s face, and Dax fell. His body hit the underbrush, and he blacked out.

This was just one hit returned out of a thousand Dax must have given Cluck. But it was perfect, and clean, and it belonged to Cluck. All those years of hiding in trees and crouching in corners, every bruise, split lip, broken finger that had held him down like a hundred little stones, now let go of him. She could see his back untensing, not fighting them anymore, until she thought the black and red of his wings would lift him off the ground if they caught the wind just right.

Lace dropped the branch and put her hands on the sides of Cluck’s face. “Are you okay?”

His palms slid over hers, warming the backs of her fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.”

A rush of voices drifted through the forest. Both their families were coming for them.

Cluck grabbed her hand and set it on the cottonwood. “Climb,” he said. One word, and she got herself up the first few branches. He followed her, their weight disturbing the boughs. Leaves fell, catching in their hair.

She stalled halfway up the tree, where they’d stopped the night he’d shown her how to climb. She set her back against the trunk. Her eyes flashed down, the ground so dark she couldn’t make out the undergrowth.

“We have to keep going.” He held her waist, easing her away from the trunk. There was strength in his palms, the assurance that whatever his family thought he was, he could own it, make it his. “I won’t let you fall.”

“I can’t,” she whispered back. “I’m not like you.”

He laughed softly. “I’m not like anybody.”

He offered his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up a bough at a time. Her arms and legs trembled, shaking the leaves on each branch she touched. The wings pulled on her shoulders. But she gave him her weight, and he kept her steady.

The two families, Paloma and Corbeau, ran from their sides of the woods and surrounded the tree. Cluck’s aunts and uncles. The woman Cluck once thought was his mother, slapping Dax’s cheek to wake him up. Eugenie. Lace’s cousins.

Cluck got her to sit down on a high bough, close to the trunk. “Don’t worry.” He sat next to her, keeping his hands on her. “We’re too far up. They can’t get to us.”

The wind made her shudder. If it caught their wings, it could knock them both from the tree like a nest.

What they both knew, what he wouldn’t say, was that they’d have to come down. And when their feet touched the undergrowth, everything they’d left on the ground would be waiting, worse for being given room to rage and spread.

The height stabbed into her. It pulsed through the dark. Cluck had brought her so high she thought she could brush her fingers against the moon. Its light reached down through the branches, showing their families’ faces.

Lace looked down enough to match the voices to the far-off figures.

“Let her go,” her uncles called up to Cluck, not begging. They reprimanded him like he was bothering a stray cat, telling him to leave it alone. Because he was a Corbeau, they thought they could scare him like they would a crow.

“Come down,” Cluck’s aunts and uncles and the older cousins said, gesturing with their hands as though he’d forgotten the way.

Dax got to his feet and lunged for the base of the tree, ready to go up after Cluck, not caring that he’d never learned to climb as high. He knew now what Lace was, that Cluck had brought a Paloma into their family, and he was ready to make Cluck pay for it.

But Nicole Corbeau dug her fingers into his arm and pulled him back. She whispered something Lace couldn’t hear. But Lace could guess. Some assurance that Cluck was not worth it. He has never belonged with us. Leave him to the Palomas. Let them do what they want with him.

“I’ll kill you, chucho,” Justin yelled up, his brothers echoing him. “Bring her down or I’ll kill you.”

Lace gripped Cluck’s arm. As long as her cousins were waiting for him, she wasn’t letting him go.

“Lace, come down,” her mother said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”

“Are you out of your minds?” Clémentine shrieked. “You’ll break your necks.”

Abuela called for them to kill him, kill the boy with the violador blood in him. Her gaze fixed on Lace’s torn wing, the white plumes proof that a Corbeau boy had not only taken Lace, but had tried to make her a feathered thing.

“Please, come down,” Martha and Emilia pleaded. “You’ll fall.”

“Cluck,” Eugenie said.

The blunt crack of a shotgun cut through the voices.

A scream tore free from Lace’s throat. She ran her hands over Cluck’s body, checking for blood, feeling for it because his shirt was too dark and too red to let her see. Wondering which of her uncles had the Winchester and if Cluck was just another crow to them.

The shot’s echo wrenched away the few pins holding the inside of her together. They fell away, so softly they did not ring out as they hit the branches, and there was nothing but the ringing of distant glass chimes.

Cluck shook his head and pointed down.

Lace’s father stood at the base of a nearby tree, his Winchester pointed at the ground. The muzzle smoked. So did a pile of leaves below the barrel. The dull burnt smell drifted up.

He’d fired it down, at nothing.

Both Palomas and Corbeaus gave his gun a wide berth.

“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted to both sides. “All of you.”

Her father didn’t understand. He had never understood. He cast off his name not because he believed Abuela’s superstitions, but because he did not care to argue. Cuervo or not, Sara Paloma would still be his wife, and Lace Paloma his daughter. To him, it was this simple.

He thought the feud was live ash a boot heel could stomp out. He didn’t notice it burning down both their houses.

“I don’t care what you are, muchacho.” Her father looked up at Cluck. “Come down. Both of you.” He lowered his eyes and held the shotgun at his side, his gaze taking in every face. “If any of you lays a hand on either of them, que Dios me ayude.”

He tilted his head back up to the tree, his stare broken only by the flickering leaves. “Come on. I won’t let them at you. Either of you.” His eyes stayed on Lace. “Te lo prometo.”

She believed him. It didn’t matter that he let the Paloma men kill crows with his own gun. He would not let the family he married into slaughter a boy.

This was their best chance, coming down, letting their families take them.

Lace pressed herself against Cluck’s chest. He put his arms around her, his hands holding her wings to her back. She wanted to remember how he smelled, the salt and the cottonwood bark. She wanted to memorize the warmth of his body on hers, the only heat that didn’t hurt her still-healing skin. When she couldn’t sleep, she would think of it, the shimmer of warmth through her breasts when she felt him looking at them.

He held her tight to him, this boy she might have grown up with. He knew what she knew, that safe meant safe, but it also meant never again. A tear on her right cheek met one on his, the only one she found on him.

She let him go, nodding. She’d go back to her family. Maybe her father would even convince Abuela to forgive the burn on her arm, and she would swim as la sirena rosa again.

She didn’t know where Cluck would go. He was born among Palomas, raised among Corbeaus, and now neither wanted him. He’d spend his life coming up with lies about his real name and what happened to his hand.

Lace would remember this one night she saw him in his black wings.

She shifted her weight, easing onto a lower branch.

Movement on the ground caught her eye. A woman’s shape wove between the trees. She reached the watchers, and her small, running steps stopped.

Tía Lora halted at the outside of the ring, lifting her chin and searching the tree. Her eyes found Cluck and Lace. A wince broke the line of her mouth, her lips waiting to say again the things she’d told her son. Eres perfecto y eres hermoso. Words she’d had to tell him now that he was a man, because the hate that lived in these woods had kept her from telling him when he was still a boy.

Those years had collected, heavy and unseen, on Lora Paloma’s shoulders. Lace took them in her hands, sharing their weight.

If Lace and Cluck came down from the cottonwood, they would lose more than afternoons in the river and nights in the trees. They would become a second Lora, another Alain. The stories would go on. Their families would strap the cuentos to their backs. The weight of them would crush their wings. Lace and Cluck would carry them into the next twenty years.

When their parents and aunts and uncles grew old, when the story of the Paloma widow and the gitano widower shrank to a few embers, Lace and Cluck would be the kindling and the kerosene. They would be the story passed down to Lace’s younger cousins, and the inheritance of the little girl with dishwater eyes and hair like Cluck’s.

The Corbeaus would say Lace Paloma seduced Cluck and then turned on him. He was lonely, and she flirted with him so she could do to him what Lora Paloma did to Alain. The Palomas would say Lucien Corbeau kidnapped Lace and forced her up into a tree. You know that scar she has on her arm? He burned it into her up there, right in front of us. We saw it. The stories would grow too big to fit in their rooms and the trunks of their cars.

Lace and Cluck couldn’t make these families, these like magnets, touch and settle. They couldn’t erase the nylon nets, the slicked branches, the broken arms. They couldn’t bury the things this town had said about Alain Corbeau along with him. They couldn’t prove that neither the Corbeaus nor the Palomas had made those trees vanish into the lake.

But she and Cluck could make sure everyone on the ground left with something closer to the truth.

Lace slid her hands onto either side of Cluck’s neck, and made him lean down to her. She kissed him so hard his breath caught in his chest.

He pulled away like she’d slapped him. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Making sure they know.” She set her open mouth on his.

This was all they had, these few minutes to prove that everything they did to each other, they both wanted. She felt Cluck registering it, understanding. They’d show everyone on the ground that they were willing to die at each other’s hands, risk the curses in each other’s fingers and lips.

He gave his mouth to hers, kissing her back. He grasped her hard enough that the fabric of her dress bunched in his hands. She moved her hands over him so quickly that when a feather brushed her fingers, she did not know if it had fallen from his hair or his wings. Her mouth found the things he’d always been but had not been allowed to be, everything in him that was dangerous and passionate.

They sparked against each other like flint. Inside that sparking, Lace heard a familiar breath in, the air spiced with a soft laugh. Neither were her own, but she knew them.

Tía Lora sighed and laughed. It rang through the air like an owl’s call. This was her returning the favor, her go on, her standing at the door and urging Lace on.

So Lace kissed Tía Lora’s son again. She kissed him harder, their mouths growing so sore they could barely move them, until they could only set their lips together, more touching than kissing.

Cluck held her, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder. He kept her so close she could look down without falling.

All those faces stared up at them, some with eyes wide. Abuela, Nicole Corbeau. Some smiling. Clémentine. Lace’s father, almost. Others just watching. Justin and his brothers, Lace’s mother.

The face she did not see was Tía Lora’s. She searched, and her eyes fell on where her great-aunt had stood.

Tía Lora was not there. In her place, a pillar of garnet-red feathers swirled and spun, even more than had floated from Lace’s suitcase. The moon shone off them like star rubies. Then the wind took them, pulling them away.

Both families watched them fly. They drifted and dispersed, like sprays of grapevine leaves in October. They rode the wind as high as the top of the cottonwood tree, bringing with them the echo of Lora Paloma’s sigh and laugh.

Cluck reached out his hand, letting one land on his palm. Lace closed his fingers over it. Another settled in his hair, the red catching in the black.

Each feather became ten more. They spread like a thousand red lacewings. They rose like every one was its own bird, full and winged. They turned the trees to autumn, all red-feathered boughs.

Cinnamon sweetened the air, the warm scent that lived on Lora Paloma’s shoulders.

The two families blinked up. Their eyes drifted back to Lace and Cluck.

She pressed her hands into him. He held her harder. The watchers on the ground half-closed their eyes, the shared cringe of seeing the second time a Paloma and a Corbeau touched.

Cluck and Lace stared back, made fearless by the blessing of a woman who had become a sky of red plumes. They clutched each other hard enough to bruise. Back off, their eyes told the watchers. We are not small enough that you can pull us where you want us to go.

It didn’t matter who thought they were brave and who thought they were too stupid to bother with. It added up to the same thing.

Abuela turned her back on them both and started walking, trying to hide her glances up at the red feathers.

Nicole Corbeau led Dax away from the cottonwood tree. Lace could see him dragging his fury behind him, a thing he’d killed and would eat raw. Whatever his mother’s words, he took them as freedom to hate Cluck, to blame him, without the sting of him being part of their family. They were rid of him now.

Nicole looked back only once, a single glance at the second son she’d never wanted.

Lace’s father left her with a last wink.

The four of them, Abuela and Barto Paloma, Nicole and Dax Corbeau, pulled the rest away. Both families backed toward their own sides, eyes still searching the sky for feathers. Palomas to the River Fork. Corbeaus to the old house.

Lace couldn’t hear what they were whispering. But now they were all witnesses to this thing she and Cluck had made them see. They would have to carry the truth, whether or not they spoke it. It would cling to them like the burrs off sticker grass. If they twisted it, it would pinch them back.

Vouloir, c’est pouvoir.

To want is to be able.

Cluck kept his arm tight around Lace’s waist. Even when all those red feathers had sailed into the highest branches, he didn’t let her go. He sat with his back to the trunk, Lace lying against him, the feathers of their wings interlacing like fingers. The wind hushed the owls, and they slept.

He’d slept in trees before, when he was small, hiding all night from Dax. But always alone, never with his arm around something it was up to him not to break.

He dreamed that his body was a red-winged blackbird’s, his skin all dark feathers except for two crimson shoulders. He felt raw and fearless, protective of the small place that was his, undaunted by any other winged thing.

The feel of an afterfeather woke him, the downy barbs brushing his jawline. It lifted up, tickling his cheek, and he opened his eyes. A constellation of Lora Paloma’s feathers whirled through the air, like coins thrown in water.

The red danced in and out of the cottonwood leaves. He hadn’t dreamt it. His mother had become a thousand of these small, jewel-bright things.

He clasped Lace’s shoulder, waking her. She shook off sleep, eyes opening to the wisps of red.

The feathers wafted down through the branches, stopping before the ground. They hovered near the cottonwood’s trunk.

Cluck and Lace followed them, him taking her waist to help her from one bough to the one below, guiding her through the air the way she pulled him through water.

They got to the ground, and the feathers stilled in the air, hovering like dragonflies.

Lace looked toward the Palomas’ part of the woods. Cluck mirrored her, looking toward the trees that led to the old Craftsman house. Their gazes crossed. She stared in the direction of the place she’d lived when her family did not want her. He watched the space between the trees. Somewhere on the other side of them was the family that would have been his if he had not grown feathers.

Then came the look between them, the question of Did we mean this? And if they did, where were they going?

They could follow those feathers. They could take his grandfather’s truck and drive, not turn around until they felt free of their own names, until they knew what to do with the truths his father and his mother had left them.

He slid his hand over her palm, asking the question he couldn’t say.

Her fingers answered his. She took his hand, held it, trapped its heat against hers.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yeah?” he asked. He wanted her sure. He wanted to know she understood. This was different than going with his family to Madera County. This was choosing him, just him, and herself, apart from every other Paloma.

She turned her head, looked at him. “Yes.”

The wind picked up. It made the trees whisper and breathe.

The feathers took off on a gust, tumbling over themselves. Cluck and Lace ran after them, following them through the new light. When the feathers floated over the old Craftsman house, the two of them got into Alain Corbeau’s Morris Cowley, and Cluck pulled it onto the road.

They drove past the Blackberry Festival, where Almendro crowned a new queen who would add sons and daughters to this town.

They drove past the grocery store and the bus stop, and the truck got up to speed on the highway. A flock of birds made a V in the corner of the windshield. They had to be calling to each other to stay together, but if Pépère hadn’t taught him that, he’d never know it from here. They seemed quiet as the clouds.

He couldn’t tell if Lace noticed them. She didn’t watch the sky as much as he did. She kept her eyes low, like she was always looking for the sun glinting off a ribbon of water.

They covered miles of highway, past the roadhouse. Past Elida Park, where a leucistic peacock crossed the crabgrass. Far enough that the sound of glass chimes in trees and breath through reed pipes could not reach them.

Far enough that he couldn’t hear the flight calls that told him to come back, to fit himself into that small space his family made for him. His grandfather had kept that space a little bigger, held it open like pulling aside hornbeam branches. Now that he was gone, it had collapsed in on itself. It couldn’t hold Cluck anymore.

Empty land flew by, studded with cornflowers. The scent, like celery seed and desert grapevine, filled the truck.

“What happened to your hand?” Lace asked.

The question drifted between them. Her words brushed his forearm like feathers.

“My brother broke three of my fingers when I was nine.” He just said it, eyes still on the highway ahead, no glance over fearing her pity or wanting it.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

His nickname did not wait on his tongue. It curled and hid on the back of his neck, where his feathers touched his collar. He straightened his shoulders, and it slept.

“Luc,” he said. “My name’s Luc.” Not Lucien. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But the name was still his. His mother had given it to him. Those first three letters let him claim it.

He felt her folding his nickname up like one of her scarves, slipping it into her dress pocket. She kept it close. She didn’t let it fly out of the truck’s windows and drift on the highway’s current like a postcard.

Luc and Lace held between them this unspoken hope, that wherever those feathers landed, they’d find an old but not old woman who smelled like cinnamon, now unafraid to cross the woods. They’d find an old man blowing cigarette smoke into the last light, ready to think of Lace Paloma as more than made of her family’s stories.

They’d find the books Cluck would study from, later editions of the same ones Pépère had read. They’d find a house, and even though Cluck wouldn’t recognize it, he’d recognize the lemon tree pressing leaves against the kitchen window. They’d find Lace’s spring with all those turtles and manatees wasn’t in Florida, but just under the ground where those feathers settled.

But the feathers didn’t settle, not yet. They floated over the highway, tumbling on the updrafts, flying like each was a whole bird, red as tourmaline. So Cluck and Lace kept driving, chasing these things that had gotten lost.