The Weight of Feathers (14 page)

The lights, the colors, and the wings swirled like a soap bubble’s surface. Her cheek stung like it was still bleeding. If she was going to make up a whole show’s worth of performers, she’d need a few more ibuprofen from her suitcase.

“I’ll be right back.” She set the brushes down and slipped into the woods.

Clémentine glided out from behind a tree, first the tip of a wing, then the rest of her. “Looking for this?” She held up Lace’s suitcase.

Lace’s back tensed. If this woman had touched the new tail
Tía
Lora made her, Lace would rip the feathers from her wings. She may not have had a bra of fake pearls to hit her with, but she had her hands, her fingernails, her teeth. She’d shred that flower crown to potpourri.

“I took nothing,” the woman said. “I did not even open it.
Je promets
.”

Lace held out her hand.

Clémentine moved the suitcase out of reach. “If you tell me where you are sleeping tonight, you can have it.”

Lace’s spine relaxed. This woman thought she was a runaway.

Her father had given her some money “to get to Terra Bella,” though he didn’t believe it any more than she did. At best, he thought she was going to stay with Licha.

But neither of them said so. Lace had just taken the folded bills, thanked him, and hidden the money in the lining of her suitcase.

“Ever heard of a motel?” Lace said.

“It’s the weekend,” Clémentine said. “They are already booked for this berry festival.”

Lace hadn’t thought of that.

Clémentine set the suitcase down between them. “If you work here, you stay here.”

Lace left the suitcase where it was. She was no runaway, and the woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. She wasn’t old enough to play mother.

“No, thank you,” Lace said.

“Dax won’t like it. He likes to keep track of everyone.” Clémentine looked over her shoulder, through the dip between her wings. “Is it the house you are afraid of?”

“A little,” Lace said. The deep, weathered wood and age-darkened windows made it look like a place Cluck could seal her inside of, making her a thing that belonged to the Corbeaus.

“You can sleep where I sleep.” Clémentine pointed to a yellow trailer. “Inside the house to wash, to cook.
Ça y est.
”

Sleeping in one of the Corbeaus’ trailers, a few feet from a Corbeau woman.

If all this would lift the feather off her forearm, Lace would do it.

She picked up her suitcase.

“
Bien,
” the woman said.

A donde fueres, haz lo que vieres.

Wherever you go, do what you see.

The Corbeau show was nothing like Justin said.

They didn’t just put on costumes and stand in the trees. They climbed the boughs like cats, moving as though the high branches were wide and solid. The hung lights showed the contours of the men’s bodies, and made the women’s dresses look like mint and peach milk. Their skirts trailed and billowed, the edges fluttering. Sometimes their curls came unpinned and spun loose against their shoulders.

The performers climbed with their wings folded down, leads tethered to their wrists so that when they reached the top, they could pull the wings open to their full span. Those cords gave them a way to bring the weight of their wings forward. But if they didn’t hold themselves upright, a sudden gust could still make them fall. If one of the women stepped wrong, she could catch her dress, tearing the fabric and slipping on the organza.

The men moved with as much calm as if it was their own muscle and not the trees holding them up. They pulled themselves onto higher branches as though the wings helped them instead of getting in the way, but Lace could guess how heavy they were.

The women’s flower crowns never came undone, the larkspur and paintbrush clinging to their heads like a swarm of butterflies. They danced like the branches were broad as a field. They arched their arms so softly they looked as though the wind moved them. One in a champagne-colored dress stood so far up on her toes and lifted a leg so high and close to her body she looked like a clock striking noon. A tall one wearing mauve did an arabesque and tilted her body so her pointed foot showed between her wings. Another in dusk blue spun along a bough in a row of turns, spotting with nothing but stars.

Now she knew why Justin said so little about the show. He didn’t want to admit how beautiful their enemies looked as they danced. When one of the men lifted one of the women, the wind turned her skirt to water. When he set her down, she landed so softly the branches didn’t bend.

The women leaped like they knew the branches would hold them, like the boughs whispered their reassurances as they flew. The men’s jumps from higher branches to lower ones made the audience gasp, and then applaud. The wind streamed through those feathers, and they looked like they were flying.

Even with the weight of those wings, Lace never caught them stumbling or flailing their hands to keep from falling. Each of them had balance as constant and rooted as these trees. If they extended their arms, it was part of the dance.

These winged creatures,
las hadas,
kept rhythm with each other, with no music but the sound of chimes hung in the trees. No metal or wood, just pieces of polished glass, the same pastels as their dresses. If the wind died down, the performers touched them, and the glass gave off shimmers of sound. They made one chime answer another, then a few more answer that one, like the staggered song of nightbirds.

When one
hada
stepped into the light, another faded into a bough’s shadow. It looked random, an unplanned dance, charged with a romance that made the audience forget these people were relatives.

Lace could sense the choreography under their movements. The show had the same patterned feel as the mermaids’ dance. The trick was making it look like no two nights were ever the same, so each performance brimmed with fleeting magic.

Sometimes a Corbeau woman opened her hand, releasing a shower of wildflowers, and girls who watched from the ground held up their palms to catch the cream petals. Lace could never spot the women filling their hands. They must have hidden the flowers, one
hada
gathering a handful when the audience was watching another.

Tourists stared up, their necks taut with the worry of watching tightrope walkers. Locals didn’t gasp, used to these shows year after year, but they still watched, smiled. Children lifted their hands and pointed whenever they spotted another fairy in the trees. After the show, the women offered children fairy stones, cheap glass pebbles full of glitter, and their small faces flooded with wonder.

Watching sowed a strange jealousy in Lace. It burrowed into her as she fell asleep on the floor of the yellow trailer. Her exile and her wounds kept her from the shutter click of families taking pictures for vacation scrapbooks. They kept her from daughters in bright dresses reaching out to touch her tail fin, wondering if it was real.

Did the women on those branches know how lucky they were to be beautiful? Lace had never been their kind of beautiful, but she’d faked it. The less stunning of the Corbeau women faked it too, now with Lace’s help.

She woke up scratching at herself, dreaming of rain. Her nails left thread-thin trails of blood, like razor cuts. Waking broke her out of the feeling that the rain was eating through her.

In the morning, Lace found another of Cluck’s feathers. It had settled into the folds of the blanket Clémentine had lent her.

Lace clutched its stem. She turned it, and red streaks showed among the black.

She thought of burning it. Instead, she tucked it into the lining of her suitcase. If she kept the ones she found, collected them, owned a little of this boy, it might give her power over him.

Her back ached as she got dressed, not from the mattress on the trailer floor, but from turning over, trying to find a way to sleep that didn’t hurt her raw skin.

She listened outside the blue and white trailer. Cluck was already throwing things around, fixing costumes. She moved to look through the cracked door. He hunched over a table, trousers on but shirtless, his hair wet. She turned away as soon as she saw his back.

As long as she could help it, she wouldn’t enter the house when he was there. She wouldn’t let him trap her inside like a firefly in a jar. It was dangerous enough being in those walls with any Corbeau.

She let herself in the back door of the house, toothbrush and makeup bag in hand. Clémentine stood at the stove in bare feet, frying an egg. Lace passed behind her.

A woman sat in the heavy-curtained dining room, her posture straight as the lines of her shoulders. She looked around forty, age softly puckering the skin at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun that looked better fit for a catalog than a schoolroom, but her plain linen dress had the clean, bland shape Lace would expect on a mayor’s wife.

She wrote in a heavy leather book, but did not bend over the page. She kept up straight, as though her dress was embroidered to the chair back.

“You are our new makeup girl,” the woman said, not looking up.

Lace thought of putting down her toothbrush to show respect. She didn’t know who the woman was, but if she kept the books, Lace shouldn’t cross her.

Lace just nodded.

The woman finished writing, and raised her eyes to Lace. She didn’t hide her study of the wine-colored burn on Lace’s cheek, or her uneven eyebrows; adhesive had left them in patches.

The woman’s face, her inspection, asked the question without her having to speak it.
You look like this and we should trust you to make us beautiful?

Lace pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth. If she got angry, this woman might hear the sound of her uncles’
zampoñas
under her breath, betraying how little she belonged beneath a canopy of glass chimes.

“Makeup doesn’t cure ugly,” Lace said. She took her things toward the downstairs bathroom.

“There are no ugly women,” the woman said. “Only lazy ones.”

Lace stopped, laughing softly.
Abuela
threw the same quote at her and her cousins, when she pointed out that Lace was getting a little fat, or that Martha’s modest dresses made her look dowdy, or the flare of acne reddening Emilia’s cheek.

Lace turned around. “Helena Rubinstein.”

The woman nodded once. A little light from between curtains crossed her face. “
Très bien
.” She motioned to a chair. “Come.”

Lace sat down, the chair legs creaking as she shifted her weight. How did the woman’s chair stay so quiet?

The table looked like an estate sale leftover. Once it must have been dark-polished wood, shining like still water. But it had been nicked and dulled so many years, it looked no grander than a wine cork. No wonder the owners left it to be rented out with the house.

“
Je m’appelle
Nicole,” the woman said.

“Lace.”

So this was Nicole Corbeau,
Abuela
’s rival.

Nicole reached for Lace’s makeup bag. “
Puis-je?
” she asked.

Lace nodded. She had nothing to hide in there. Her tail was in her suitcase, locked, and her skirt and blouse covered her scales.

“Are you one of the performers?” Lace asked.

Nicole laughed a curt laugh, neat as her chignon. “I was.” Her fingers searched the pouch’s contents. “Now I keep the books. Dax is my son. So is
le cygnon
.”

“Who?” Lace asked.

“It’s a nickname. His cousins call him Cluck.”

“Dax and Cluck are brothers?”

The woman laughed again.

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

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

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

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

“It’s what I used to use.”

“And now?”

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

“It makes it look worse,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me?” Lace asked.

“I will show you how to fix it.”

“I know how to do makeup.”

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

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

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

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

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

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