The Weight of Feathers (31 page)

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.”