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.”
Lucien. The name stilled him in a way that made Lace sure it was his. He hadn’t even told her when she asked. He’d just given her Luc, the first syllable. He’d let her take off his shirt before he’d been willing to let her have those last three letters.
“How do you know that name?” he asked.
“I gave you that name,” Tía Lora said.
Cluck sat down and dragged his fingers through his hair, holding his head in his hands. Tía Lora put her palm on his back, and Lace could guess what she whispered. These were the words she needed to say to him. Él era tu padre y yo soy tu madre.
He was your father, and I am your mother.
Cluck would not know the words, but he’d understand the meaning, the sum of all these things she’d said.
He moved his hands to his eyes. When Lace stilled her breathing, she could hear him sobbing into them, the gasps in for air, the wet breaking at the back of his throat. His tears spread over the heels of his palms. His wrists shone wet.
Tía Lora and her truths had broken him. These things he did not know broke him. These were things he should have learned over years. That way they might have worn into him slowly, water cutting a place in rock. This way, all at once, they cracked him like shale.
“I killed him,” Cluck said. “I was supposed to take care of him and I didn’t.”
Lace’s fingernails worried the paint on the door frame. This was what he thought? That his grandfather’s death was on him?
Tía Lora rubbed her palm up and down his back. The forwardness of it, like she’d been doing it since he was small, made Lace part her lips midbreath. Tía Lora had never been a woman anyone would call bold. But now that she could touch this lost son, she treated him like there was no question he belonged to her.
“You know that’s not true,” Tía Lora told Cluck.
Cluck let out a rough laugh, quiet and small. “I do?”
“You should.” Tía Lora put a hand under his chin to make him look at her. “Because I do.”
The pain didn’t leave Cluck’s face. But Lace saw one small break in it, a second of easing up, like a candle flame darkening before the wick caught again.
He almost believed Tía Lora. The only person who could tell him he didn’t kill the man he did not know was his father was the woman he did not know was his mother.
He pressed his lips together, hiding the faint tint of violet Lace always looked for on the inside of his lower lip.
This possibility, that Alain Corbeau being gone was not his fault, was putting another handful of cracks in him.
But Tía Lora did not let him splinter. She got him to his feet, took the black wings off the bed and tied them to his body. She fastened the ribbons, her hands as gentle and sure as if he’d always been hers. Like she would have buttoned his coat when he was six, straightened his collar when he was ten, fixed his tie when he was fifteen.
He straightened his shoulders, holding up those dark wings.
“Eres perfecto y eres hermoso,” Lora Paloma said, her voice still low. You are perfect, and you are beautiful.
Cluck shut his eyes, salt drying on his cheeks. He nodded without understanding. If he had understood, he might not have nodded. He did not believe he was perfect or beautiful. But if no one told him what Tía Lora’s words meant, he would nod, and she would think he believed.
Lace kept a last handful of secrets for both of them. She did not tell Cluck that Lora Paloma had wanted a child worse than she wanted her own breath. That the only reason she hadn’t had one before Cluck was that her husband had beaten every life out of her but her own. This man the Palomas had called a martyr the night the lake took him.
Tía Lora had told Lace that part, and then asked her to forget it.
Lace hadn’t told Tía Lora that Cluck had grown up never knowing when his brother might leave a bruise on his temple or throw him against a piece of rented furniture. She didn’t tell her that, to Cluck, trees were as much a place to hide as a way to find the sky.
This was the bond they shared that they’d never know. They had both been beaten by men who decided that the only things worth less than their souls were their bodies.
Cluck said something to Tía Lora. She nodded, and he left.
“Go with him,” Tía Lora said. “Tell him to wait. Tell him not now.”
So Lace caught up in the motel hallway. Even down, his left wing brushed the wall. The black primaries grazed the yellowing paper.
“You okay?” Lace asked.
“No,” he said. “No. Not really.”
“Where are you going?”
He shoved through a side door. He held it open behind him, but didn’t look back at her. “I’ve got some questions for my family. Or, not my family.”
She followed him across the parking lot. He did not go toward the road. He went to the edge of the property that backed against the trees.
“Speaking of family, I guess you and I are, what?” He worked out the math. “Second cousins?”
“First cousins once removed.” She’d done the math on the back of a napkin that morning. “But we’re not blood related.”
She was no more related to him than she was to any other Corbeau. But if her family had let Tía Lora keep him, he would have been a Paloma, the only one who neither had Paloma blood nor had married into the family. Lace would have grown up sharing school lessons with him, talking him into swimming, making fun of him if she ever caught him pulling out the feathers under his hair.
But even with the Paloma name, those feathers would have stopped her family from claiming him as theirs, the same as the streaks of red and his left-handedness left him a little outside the Corbeaus.
“Well, there’s a silver lining, huh?” he said.
She could feel him grasping at it, looking for a way to make this funny. This was the best he could do. He was reaching for the joke, and his hands found this because it hurt less than anything else. This was how he broke things into pieces small enough to hold.
She got in front of him and stopped him. “You sure you wanna do this now?” she asked. The Corbeaus must have still been in their mourning clothes.
“No, I don’t. I want to do this ten years ago. Hell, I’d settle for a week ago.” He scratched at his cheek, where his tears had dried into salt. “But now is the best I can get.”
Le loup retourne toujours au bois.
The wolf always goes back to the woods.
“Cluck?”
He heard Lace saying his name, but didn’t answer.
He understood now. It clicked into place like the last wire on a wing frame. It slashed at him, a knife grown dull from sitting in a drawer. It left a line of little scratches instead of a clean cut.
Pépère had been careful. He’d given Cluck the quiet space to use his left hand and climb trees higher than any in the show. He’d never fought his own daughter on the show’s schedule or not taking Cluck to church, because Nicole Corbeau knew the secret that could always get him to back down.