“How could you let him believe all this?” Lace asked. Her voice would have broken into screaming if she’d had the air. She heard the full, heavy call of arundo reeds creep into the words, their breath holding up her weak voice. She didn’t care. Let Nicole Corbeau hear it. Let her know Lace was a sirena who would not keep Corbeau lies locked under her tongue.
Nicole Corbeau pressed on Lace’s back to get her into a side room.
She shut the door. “I didn’t decide it. My sisters did.”
“But you went along with it,” Lace said.
“Dax’s father left. He wouldn’t marry me. You don’t know what that means in this family.” She folded her thin arms over the black linen of her dress. “They decided this was my penance for having the son I wanted. Being forced to raise another who wasn’t mine.”
Two bastardos who would think they shared a vanished father.
“Dax doesn’t know?” Lace asked.
Nicole’s laugh was small but sharp. “He thinks he remembers when I was pregnant. He was five. You can convince a child that age of anything.”
“And your father?” Lace asked. “How’d you convince him? He agreed to this?”
“This whole town called him a rapist. He thought if he raised le cygnon himself the name would brand him too. That the scandal would follow le cygnon his whole life.”
Le cygnon.
“You can’t even say his name, can you?” Lace asked.
Nicole Corbeau could not have known then that Cluck would turn out left-handed. That, as he grew, the black cygnet down would give way to red-streaked feathers. That he would look so much like Alain Corbeau, el gitano. She hated him for all these things, but most of all she hated him because she could not love him as she loved her own perfect bastardo, the son she wanted even if his father did not stay.
“Who told you?” Nicole asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Does he know?”
“No,” Lace said. “He doesn’t.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Would you care if I did? If I tell him, he’ll hate you. He’ll leave. And then you’ll never have to see him again.”
A wince tightened Nicole’s face and stiffened her shoulders. For a second Lace felt sorry for the woman Nicole Corbeau had been back then. A young mother shamed for having a child but no husband. A woman not much older than Lace, who had no more power to fight the law of her family than las sirenas had to defy Abuela.
Like Tía Lora, Nicole Corbeau paid for having a son when she was not married. But while Tía Lora’s punishment was losing a son, Nicole Corbeau’s was being given one she did not want.
Lace sobbed into the air, her hands too wet to take it. She cried not just for Cluck and for Tía Lora, but for the young woman who had hardened into the Nicole Corbeau who now stood in this room. The salt of her tears seeped into her burn, dragging through like a safety razor slipping. “Did you ever want him?”
“I already had the son I wanted,” Nicole Corbeau said.
There was no sharpness in her face, no cruelty. She said it as plainly as whether the eggs this week were good or not.
“You could’ve gotten rid of him months ago,” Lace said. “He’s eighteen. You could’ve kicked him out on his last birthday. There wouldn’t even have been paperwork.”
“It’s not up to me to decide where he goes,” Nicole said. “It never has been. This family keeps him here to teach him, to help him be something better than he was born. He is our blood. It’s up to us to look after him.”
“Is that what you all think you’re doing?” Lace threw the door open.
“Where are you going?” Nicole Corbeau asked.
“If you won’t get him out, I will,” Lace said.
“Take him. Avec ma bénédiction.”
The words hooked into Lace, pulling her so she almost turned around. They almost got her to talk back, to say That’s what you want, isn’t it? So he won’t be your problem anymore? So you all won’t have to contain how evil he is?
But she did not stop. She did not stop when she reached the back door, or the dirt road, or the paved street. She did not stop until she reached the chemical plant’s fence line.
The few remaining protestors sent their chants through the chain link. She wove through, keeping her eyes off the mixing tanks, so the sight of them would not stab into her cheek.
She slipped her fingers into the fence. “Hey.” She rattled the chain link and yelled over the protestors’ chanting. “I want to see your lawyer. Your actuary. Whatever you call him. Whoever showed up at the cemetery this morning, I want to see him.”
A security guard approached the fence, his steps slow, one eye half-shut. He was a younger one, still getting the bearing of the job. He had the kind of extra weight that made him look soft, but that heft gave his arms power. Lace knew because of Justin. His body had that same look, and Lace had seen the blood and bruises he left.
“He came here to handle people, didn’t he?” Lace yelled, shaking the fence. “Tell him to get out here and handle me.”
If she had still been with her family’s show, Abuela would have fired her, swept all her things into an empty suitcase like she had Licha’s. Las niñas buenas did not stand outside fences, squawking and making shows of themselves.
But what had all this behaving gotten Tía Lora? A lover she had not been allowed to see. A lie that ruined the one man who’d been kind to her. And a son she’d barely gotten to hold. A boy who grew up thinking his father was a man he had never known, and his mother a woman who considered him nothing more than a weak copy of his older brother.
The security guard watched her, the dilemma pulling at that half-closed eye. She could see it twisting the muscles at the corners of his mouth. Should he escort her off the property? Throw out the girl the chemical plant cooked? Right now she was nothing. A number, an injury, an item so low on the lawyers’ list she drifted off the bottom of the page. But if some in-town reporter caught the story and got it into the next day’s paper, the bad publicity might stick.
The red heart on Lace’s cheek already showed. She turned her head so it was all he could see.
She lowered her voice. “Get him out here, or I start talking.”
He knew what she meant. She’d hidden from the papers and local station camera crews, first with her family, then with the Corbeaus, los gitanos the reporters wouldn’t get near. But she didn’t have to. Some county paper could print her picture, the garnet on her cheek showing up even in black-and-white.
The guard nodded to another guard. She waited five minutes, and a man in a newly pressed suit came out to the fence line. He held an ice pack to the side of his face.
She could smell his aftershave through the fence, the sharp resin of synthetic pine. His hair, neat and styled, made her think of leather briefcases, dry cleaners, first class red-eyes.
She pointed at his cheek. “Luc Corbeau gave you that, right?”
A sneer wrinkled his upper lip. He smoothed it, and said nothing.
“Are you pressing charges?” she asked.
“That’s none of your business.”
He started walking away, giving the security guard a look of don’t let this bother me again.
“Actually it is.” Lace held the fence and stood on her toes. “Because I want to know if I’m going to the county paper tomorrow morning.”
He stopped, the heel of one polished shoe lifted midstep.