Lace dove down again, too far for him to see her shape.
He waded in up to his chest, the water cooling his skin. “Lace?”
She grabbed him and pulled him down. He stumbled forward, and went under.
He opened his eyes and saw the colors of her. The black of her hair, her skin the brown of river alluvium, the rose salt of her tail. Light streamed through her like she was made of water.
He ran out of air fast. When he tried to get to the surface, she held him down. He fought her, and she held him tighter.
The muscles around his lungs tensed and then cramped. She was killing him. The truth that she was a Paloma, a nivasi, dug into his skull. She would murder him before she would love him. She would keep him under and drown him.
Water got into his throat, and he couldn’t fight her anymore. She wrapped her arms around his chest, pulling him into the dark. Then she dragged him out of the water and up onto the bank.
The light stabbed into him. Air flooded into his lungs, shoving the water out.
She turned him onto his side and held a hand to his back. “Breathe.”
He coughed up the water.
She held onto him. “Breathe.”
He sat up and gasped to get his breath. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“I was trying to move you,” she whispered. “Look.” She turned his head.
The muscles near his lungs eased and then tightened again. Two figures showed through the tree cover. Two of the guys from the liquor store.
They threw pinecones into the river and pulled wild pomelos off a tree.
“What are they doing here?” He didn’t have to try to keep his voice low. He didn’t have the air to break to a whisper.
“Our families are closer together than you think,” she said.
He hadn’t thought about it since the accident. He’d gone out looking for Eugenie, and Eugenie never would’ve seen Lace if they didn’t share a band of woods with the Palomas.
Lace’s cousins found all the ripe pomelos, tugged down each yellow-green fruit. The tree seemed to straighten its shoulders, free from the extra weight. Lace’s cousins moved on, toward the Palomas’ side of the woods.
“What the hell can you do with those things?” Cluck asked. Pomelos were bitter as cough syrup, especially the wild ones.
“Aguas frescas,” Lace said. “With enough water and sugar, you can make anything drinkable.”
She pulled herself up on the bank, her tail dragging through the mud. “I’m sorry I almost drowned you.”
His breathing evened, but the guilt of thinking she was trying to kill him made the tensing of his lungs worse. “Better you than them.”
She lay on her back, squinting into the sun, and covered her breasts with her palms. The sun shone off her wet hands.
“It’s because I was hungry,” she said, like he’d asked her a question.
“What?” he asked.
“The night we met. I was buying that much from the liquor store because I was hungry. I wouldn’t eat all day because if I ate I looked fat in my tail. Then after the show I was really hungry, so I’d eat everything. Then I had to not eat the next day. Same thing every day, trying to fit into my tail.”
He looked at how the tail clung to her hips and legs. “Seems like it fits to me.”
“Thanks to hospital food.” She patted her thigh through the fabric, her other hand sliding over so her arm covered her breast. “But these show everything.”
She sounded like Clémentine and Violette with their honey and chili powder. The show’s filmy dresses floated near their bodies, hiding a lot more than that tail. It didn’t matter to them. They downed those chili powder mixes a few weeks before the show season started. We don’t want to be fat fairies, n’est-ce pas?
It wasn’t just the women. Before the shows, the men oiled their chests, and after, they argued over who the girls in the audience had looked at most. Cluck had given up competing early. His body was strong enough to do what it needed to do. He’d never be much to look at, and he’d never be as big as Dax, but he could do his work. Pépère had taught him that mattered more than how a man looked with his shirt off and wings strapped to his back.
“My grandmother was a mermaid in Florida,” Lace said. “They swim with manatees and sea turtles there.”
“Sure they do.”
“It’s true.” She turned onto her stomach. The ends of her hair brushed the bank. The mud darkened the back of her tail. “I’m gonna get there one day. Be one of their mermaids.”
If Florida was anything like his family’s show, they’d throw her out by the time she turned thirty. Thirty-five if she was really good.
“Is that what you want?” he asked.
“It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“Then you should do it. But you should know it’s not all you can do.”
“Sure.” She turned over again. “I’ll just get a job with my rocket science degree.”
“I mean it,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of people I know for sure are smarter than I am.” It didn’t matter how bad or how ugly he was. Pépère, always asking for the wingspan of the snowy owl, or when cobalt chloride was pink and when it was blue, had made sure Cluck didn’t grow up stupid. “My grandfather’s one of them. You’re one of them.”
She squinted into the sun. “How do you know?”
“You fooled all of us, didn’t you?” he asked. “You could do anything you want.”
“I want to do something I’m good at,” she said. “I was getting good at this.”
“You’re good at a lot of things.”
She reached over for a black-red feather that had stuck to his collarbone.
Her fingers skimmed his chest, and he flinched.
Maybe this was how the peacocks felt at molting season, having him come around to pick up what they’d shed.
“Can’t you collect somebody else’s?” he asked.
“I like yours.”
“But they grow in red.” The reason sounded as weak as the idea that he would hate white birds. It sounded like a superstition with no more weight than les contes de bonne femme, the old wives’ tales. He’d never needed to give it words. His family had always understood better than he had, and they did not tell strangers.
Lace held the feather up to the light and blew on it, fluffing the barbs. A slick of river water still shone on her mouth. He wondered if it would taste more like her or more like the river.
“Cuervo,” she said, soft as breathing out.
“What?” he asked.
“My last name should have been Cuervo,” she said. “It’s my father’s last name. But my grandmother made him change it to marry my mother.”
“Why?”
“It means ‘crow.’”
Cuervo. Corbeau.
Cluck knew what Lace meant, that they weren’t so different, that the space between them was made only of names and colors. But the bitterness went into Cluck like the slip of a paring knife. He would have wanted the choice not to be a red-streaked thing among all his family’s perfect black.
Now her father took aim at the black birds in the woods, shooting his own name.
Lace propped herself up on her elbows. A thin layer of silt coated her breasts.
The scales on her back caught the light. He counted five, each perfect, like the adhesive rain hadn’t touched them. The reaction between the cyanoacrylate and the cotton of her dress should have burned them as much as the rest of her, hiding them. Instead they arced across the small of her back, smooth as coins of scar tissue, iridescent like the leucistic peacock’s eyespots. She moved her hips, and a handful of colors showed.
The blade of that paring knife pulled back, the wound mending shut.
She moved, and the waist of her tail slipped down an inch.
He counted a sixth, a seventh, each iridescent as a blue mussel shell.