“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. S
he 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.
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.
The Weight of Feathers Page 20