The sun showed the faint washes on the eyespots. The sheer yellow of a lemon slice’s inner curve. A blush of pink and violet. The blue and green of certain chickens’ eggs.
He sat up and rubbed the back of his neck, stiff from falling asleep at the table. He hadn’t been able to use the wire frame he’d salvaged after the accident. Those were for men’s wings, too tall and broad for Lace’s body.
He checked the blue and white trailer. “Lace?”
She wasn’t there. She’d smoothed the sheet on the built-in, folded the blanket. Her suitcase was flopped closed but not locked.
A point of light winked from the floor. He picked it up, held it to the window. A plastic sequin, pink and translucent as a grapefruit segment.
He took off toward the woods. If that sequin had fallen off what he thought it had fallen off of, he had to find her before Dax did.
He ran toward the river, listening for the sound of her splashing over the soft rush of the current.
Through the reeds, he spotted the pink of her costume and the wet black of her hair. She turned in the water, the sun glinting off her body. It made the drops on her shoulders and arms glow. It glimmered through the beads and sequins on her costume. Her fin flicked the river, a petal off a tulip tree.
Her skin was healing. Though still dark as new blackberries, the heart on her cheek had grown small as an apricot. The burns on her back had lightened and started to scar over.
She dove down, staying under so long he thought of the colanders catching her tail.
“Lace?” He took off his shirt to go in after her.
She surfaced, blinking the sediment from her eyes. How did she tread with that tail on? Wet, with all the beading, it must’ve weighed ten pounds.
His family would tell him countless men had lost their lives this way. In stories, soldiers and travelers neared ponds and rivers, drawn by les feux follets, those luring lights, and the laughter and singing of water spirits. Some were like Melusine, the river spirit whose legs became fins every Saturday. If a mortal man caught her in her true form, she would turn to a serpent and kill him.
These were his family’s bedtime stories, those evil women with scales on their bodies and fins for feet. Where other children were told not to play with fire, Cluck and his brother and cousins were warned off water. When Cluck was thirteen or fourteen, his grandfather cautioned him against the nivasia, mermaids who became pregnant by mortal men and then murdered them.
All those stories ended the same. She was beautiful. A man loved her. She killed him.
Lace saw him, but didn’t startle.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“You said you wanted to see it.” She flicked her tail, and water sprayed his forearms. “I thought if I showed you, you’d tell me what happened to your hand.”
“I never agreed to that.”
The shape of her bare breasts showed, lighter brown than the rest of her. They floated like fallen oranges. He couldn’t tell whether the accident had scarred them. The refraction through the water kept him from seeing.
The blue-black of the river made them look pale. They glowed like twin moons, turned gold from staying near the horizon.
Heat crawled up the back of his neck. “You’re not wearing a top.”
“What were you expecting? A couple of clam shells and a piece of string?”
“Don’t give me that.” He’d seen the show. The Paloma women wore costume pieces that looked like bras covered in sequins. “If you all performed topless, the chamber of commerce would have you arrested before your hair dried, and you know it. You’ve got to wear something.”
“We do,” she said. “And mine got ruined the night you found me.”
She must have forgotten how much length her hair had lost that night. When she lifted her shoulders out of the water, the ends stuck to her breasts, but didn’t cover them. He looked at them so hard he could almost feel their weight in his palms. He wondered if the water would leave them cool, or if they’d give off the warmth that lived under her skin. He thought of touching her until there was none of the river’s cold left on her, just the heat of his hands.
Those thoughts stayed on him. He felt them sticking to him like his feathers stuck to the back of his neck when his hair was wet. That feeling, strong as the prickling of vanes and barbs, made him want to check his body for some mark she’d left on his skin. There had to be something on him that would tell her how much he wanted to touch her, a thing clear and dark as the imprint his feather had put on her.
“You’re blushing,” she said. “I thought you were French.”
“Not that kind of French.”
She flicked her tail again. The glass beads looked like the million bubbles of water just starting to boil.
If any of the family caught them, they’d have worse trouble than stories about Melusine and the nivasia.
“Get out of that thing before somebody sees you.” He knelt on the bank. “Where’s your dress?”
She went under again, staying close enough to the surface that he could make her out. Her hair was as dark and blue-black as the river until the sun lit it up and turned it red-brown. Her back looked like a sandbar glinting with mica. He couldn’t tell the scarring from the rippled water.
Her tail reminded him of raw pink salt. As she moved, the light found the clusters of glass beads.
She surfaced. The sun on the water broke into pieces.
She swam up to the bank and rested her forearms on a rock. “You coming in?”
“I don’t swim,” he said.
“You don’t know how?”
“I know how.” He wasn’t going to win any contests for holding his breath, but he knew how not to drown. How to get out of a colander and how to fight a current. His grandfather had taught him so he would keep safe around rivers, not so he could swim in them. “I just don’t.”
“Fine.” She wrung out her hair and let it all fall to one side of her neck, leaving one of her breasts bare under the water. He hoped the distance between them was enough to hide where he was looking. “But I’m not getting out until you get in,” she said.
Pépère didn’t much care for water, so Cluck didn’t either. It had to do with the Romani traditions, what parts of their bodies they could wash at which places in the river, how if a man didn’t know the current, something clean could be made mochadi. Unclean.
But Cluck had never learned all the rules. His mother had told him he was too young to understand, and then, when he was older, too stupid. That he shouldn’t worry about it because they were lucky enough to have running water. They didn’t have to think about the Romani laws that ran in his grandfather’s blood like silt in streams.
Lace brushed a hand over his thigh, leaving her wet fingerprints on his pants. “You coming in, or not?”
His shirt was already unbuttoned and off, from almost going in after her. So he pulled off his undershirt, his socks and shoes, but kept his trousers on. If his grandfather had worried over Cluck taking Lace’s dress off the night of the accident, he’d have strong words about Cluck pulling off his pants to swim. Going shirtless was bad enough. If Cluck wore nothing but his boxers around a girl, Pépère would know. He’d just know, the same way he knew, years ago, that Cluck was lying about having made himself right-handed.
Cluck didn’t jump or slide in. He found where the bank sloped instead of dropping off, and waded in one slow step at a time. The water soaked his ankles, then crept up his trouser legs.
If Sara-la-Kali and the Three Marys wanted to pull him back, he’d let them. But they didn’t, so he let the nivasi near him.