Then she just held the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing her front into her knees. “Everyone in this town thinks I’m crazy now, don’t they?”
By morning the whole town would probably hear about the girl who snapped while waiting for a bus.
“You want me to lie to you?” he asked.
“So that’s a yes.”
“If they know you’re from a show family, then believe me, they thought you were crazy already.” He poured hot water over lavender buds, thyme leaves, lemon peel, the way his grandfather told him Mémère used to for her sisters when they couldn’t sleep, and then for Pépère and their children.
The lavender and lemon cut the scent of rain. It had stopped, but the metallic smell of clouds hung on.
“They really kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cluck sat next to her on the built-in and set the cup in her hands. “Your family?“
She took it. “It’s not that simple.”
He rolled up one of the shirtsleeves, one slow cuffing-up at a time, in case she stopped him. She didn’t.
He folded the cuff up to show the semiplume imprint. “You thought I gave you this?”
“It’s your feather,” she said.
The truth pinched at him. It did look like one of his feathers, its shadow caught and made still.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t put it there. I promise. It’s a burn. It’ll heal, and it’ll either scar or it won’t.”
It wasn’t Cluck’s choice whether it stayed, but he wanted it to. He wanted that mark on her, the copy of one of his feathers. The shame of it pushed up against his anger about Dax signing off that net.
“How’d you get out of that thing?” Cluck asked. “The night the mixing tank blew.”
“How do you think?” she asked. “I ripped my costume.”
He remembered putting the fabric and beading into the river, watching the water take it. “That was your tail Dax had, wasn’t it?”
She nodded.
That was why she’d kissed him, because he’d taken something that had once been part of her out of his brother’s hands.
“Don’t you hate me?” she asked.
“For not telling me? I can’t blame you, seeing as how I took it so well.”
“No, because you hate my family.”
“I don’t hate your family,” he said. “I hate what they did.”
“How do you know they did it?”
“I wasn’t there, so I don’t. But my best guess is that they did.”
“Your best guess is wrong,” she said.
He wasn’t doing this again. Whatever happened twenty years ago, neither of them had been around to be part of it. Lace hadn’t even been born when the Palomas got his grandfather laid off. It wasn’t on her. Cluck was keeping the rest of their families outside the trailer door. There wasn’t enough room for everybody.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“You tell me. If you knew for sure you were right, would you still want me here?”
“If you knew for sure you were, would you want to be here?”
She brushed her thumb over the cut on his lip. The pad was hot from the cup.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“You should see the other guy.”
“It wasn’t my cousins, was it?”
“No.”
“Who was it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. There aren’t usually introductions.” He got up from the built-in. “Drink that, okay?”
“Are you drugging me so you can go through my suitcase?” she asked. “I’ll save you some trouble. Yes, my costume’s in there. Not that I’ll need it anytime soon.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She rubbed her thumb over a cuff button. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“I’m not,” he said. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have wanted to know her. He’d never have known what it felt like to hold a girl with a fear of falling, to help her steady her weight on those high branches. He never would have met that woman who made him so sure what Mémère would have been like.
He listened for the back door of the house opening or closing. He shouldn’t have had Lace in the blue and white trailer with him. But he was so far past “shouldn’t.” He’d held a Paloma girl close enough to feel the heat of her mouth through his shirt. He’d let a Paloma woman fix the splintered bone in his ring finger. If the Palomas’ magie noire was poison, he had more than enough in him to kill him. And if it didn’t, it meant there was so much in him it was turning him, his body folding it into its cells until he was immune.
Cluck wouldn’t tell anyone about the Paloma who’d fixed his ring finger. They’d just call her une sorcière. He didn’t even know how to tell Lace without sounding like he was calling the woman a witch.
“You want to come back to the show?” he asked her.
Lace watched the lavender spin in the cup.
“You’re good at your job,” he said. “No one wants to lose you.”
She flicked the side of the cup with her forefinger, and the buds spun the other way.
“No one has to know,” he said.
“Half your family must have heard us.” She set the teacup down. “I think they already do.”
“They didn’t hear what we were saying. My brother. He just thinks we’re, uh … You know.”
She laughed and curled on her side, looking up at the trailer’s water-stained ceiling. Mémère’s dreamless cure was working.
“Why’d you come after me?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I went out for milk.”
She shut her eyes. “What happened to your hand?”
Even half-asleep, she kept trying.
“Car door,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Which car?” he asked. “It was this old Ford. It barely ran. We don’t have it anymore.”
“Which hand, Cluck?”
A hollow place inside him grew hot and tight, like the neutron stars in Pépère’s books. He checked his right ring finger. It bent and straightened. He flinched, wondering if Mémère’s tea let Lace see things, places now healed but once broken.
Lace let her cheek fall against the mattress. “It’s not fair. You know everything about me now.”
“No, I don’t.”
“There’s stuff I want to know about you, and there’s nothing left you want to know about me.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “There’s plenty I want to know.”
“Like what?”
“How you look in that tail.”
She smiled, not making it all the way to a laugh, and slept.
The muscles in his right hand hummed, full of electricity as dry clouds. The bone knitting in his ring finger was new and restless. It wanted to act, to make something. So he collected the years of white peacock feathers off the floor, and took his wires and tools to the Airstream.
Thanks to Lace, a little of la magie noire ran through his blood. A trace of what made her a Paloma had gotten into him.
He liked it, that sense of something new and sharp and alive. If he forgot for a second that Lace and that woman who made him think of Mémère were Palomas, it made him feel safe and awake. Like when everyone was gone in the afternoon, and Cluck slept for that one quiet hour before call time, knowing Dax and his mother were far from the blue and white trailer. He’d wake up and splash cold water on his face, ready for all the evening’s noise and little lights.
But just because he liked what Lace had done to him didn’t mean he’d let it go one way.
It was time he returned the favor.
Qui craint le danger ne doit pas aller en mer.
He who fears danger should not go to sea.
He didn’t remember finishing, or falling asleep.
The sun came through the Airstream’s curtains, needling his eyes. It lit up the worktable, and the hundreds of leucistic feathers wired into wings. They had the same frame as the other wings, bent metal standing in for humerus, ulna, radius. Carpals and metacarpals. The leucistic peacock’s back coverts, molted each season, shaped the grain of the feathers.