Pépère had felt like more than a grandfather because he was. He showed Cluck more patience than he showed his other grandchildren because Cluck was not one of them.
This was why Pépère let Cluck wear his old clothes even when he thought he shouldn’t, because they let him be something more to Cluck than what his children had decided.
“Cluck.” She held his arm to stop him. “I need to know you can hear me.”
“I can hear you,” he said, and kept walking.
She went with him.
He didn’t like looking at her. Every time he saw the dark stain of the wound on her cheek, he remembered that the plant hadn’t just sealed her dress to her body that night. They hadn’t just killed Pépère with the things they’d sent into the air. They’d caused the accident that killed a Corbeau who’d just learned to walk the highest branches.
They’d turned the Corbeaus and the Palomas from rivals to enemies.
These were the things they’d done that his grandfather would never tell him. And he thought of all of them when he saw Lace.
But she was his witness, the girl who would speak for Lora Paloma when Lora Paloma would not cross the woods to speak for herself. If they wanted to hurt Lace, they would have to kill him.
“Why the hell did my grandfather go along with this?” he asked.
“Because he didn’t want you growing up with everyone thinking you were born because he raped your mother,” Lace said.
“I wouldn’t have thought that.”
Now Pépère would never know that the lie wasn’t Lora Paloma’s. She had been the one to pull it back. But it had been too late. The Palomas’ lies had already rained over the whole town. Nothing Lora Paloma said could make them forget.
His family had kept him from knowing his father as his father, and the Palomas had kept him from knowing his mother at all.
There wasn’t enough of him to hate them all. He’d been able to hate the Palomas because he loved Pépère, even if he didn’t love the woman he’d thought was his mother and the man he’d thought was his brother. Now he didn’t have that love to push against, to give the hate direction. So the hate drifted, unanchored, trying to find a current. It turned over inside him, the edges catching his lungs and heart and stomach. He didn’t know how to hate unless he had something to love.
“Lace.”
“What?” she asked, and he realized he’d said her name out loud.
“Nothing.” He’d been thinking her name but hadn’t meant to speak it. “Sorry.”
Lace. He could love her. The Palomas had thrown her away too, and she would never be a Corbeau, no matter how many of their faces she painted. He couldn’t even make her one, because he wasn’t one. That he was both Corbeau and Paloma made him neither.
It didn’t matter if he had no Paloma blood. Lora had become a Paloma, taken the name, spent so many years among them they had become her family. The Corbeau and Paloma in him would not mix, like the almond oil and apple cider vinegar Clémentine put on her hair. She could shake the bottle, but the two liquids always pulled apart. He felt himself separating out, becoming two things in one body, one half of him Corbeau and the other Paloma. He was one of the half-leucistic peacocks his grandfather had shown him in books. A pale body patched with blue, a tail fan that was half-white and half-green.
He stopped and looked at Lace. “Go back,” he said. “Stay with…” He got caught on what to call the woman he had just met for the second time. Your great-aunt. Lora. My mother.
Before he could decide, Lace said, “No.”
He breathed out. “Please? I don’t want you over there. Not for this.”
“If you’re going, I’m coming with you.”
“They’re gonna blame you for telling me.” The white wings wouldn’t do her any favors either. Maybe none of his family spoke Spanish, but they knew what Paloma meant as well as Lace knew what Corbeau meant.
“I’m not going back unless you come with me,” she said.
He saw the wager in her eyes, her bet that if she refused to let him do this alone, she could get him to turn back.
“Then I guess you’re coming with me.” He kept going, and she kept up.
He’d stand between her and his family if he had to, his wings making him a feathered shield.
How many of them already knew? Pépère, now in the ground, the truth clutched against his chest with Mémère’s finest doily. Cluck’s mother, and her brother and sisters.
Did Dax? Did Eugenie and his other cousins? Had they wondered why Cluck looked so little like Dax or his mother and so much like old photographs of Pépère?
“My mother.” The word felt wrong in his mouth. “Her. Nicole. She doesn’t even like me.”
“No,” Lace said. “She doesn’t.”
That almost made him laugh. He liked that Lace wasn’t trying to make any of this soft.
“Then why would she agree to this?” he asked.
“Because your family told her to,” Lace said.
“She hates me. She could’ve said no.”
“Really?” Lace asked, the word so sharp Cluck felt it.
“Good point,” he said.
Lace knew better than anyone. Once her family came down on her for that feather on her arm, no one short of God himself could help her. In this way, the Corbeaus were no different from the Palomas. Nicole Corbeau’s word may have ruled now, but no one got to make Corbeau law without years of following them first.
What Cluck was hadn’t made Nicole Corbeau hate him. That he was at all had. It made his rage toward her both smaller and sharper.
Cluck laughed, the noise slight but sudden.
“What?” Lace asked.
“You know I’ve never seen my birth certificate?” he said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Nicole Corbeau had made sure of it. When he went to the DMV for his driver’s license, she had kept it for him, not even letting him hold it long enough to look. She’d told him he’d lose it. He’d taken it the same as he took every other time she rolled her eyes or turned her back. That he was stupid, bad, ugly.
He wanted his birth certificate, the original. He wanted to hold that slip of paper, read it.
He wondered if his grandfather ever thought of leaving with him. But after the plant fired him, Pépère had fallen in with the family, given up on getting another engineering job, knowing he’d never get a good reference out of the Almendro plant. The only place for him and Cluck was with the rest of the family. The once-engineer, and le cygnon who did not turn white as he got older but only grew darker.
In the dark, Cluck couldn’t tell if they’d reached the part of the woods closer to his family than hers. He waited for some shift in the air, like the trailing edge of a cold front, wet warmth turning to ice crystals.
Lace gripped Cluck’s arm, stopping him.
“What?” he asked.
A figure stepped out from behind a tree. Cluck recognized the broad shape.
“You back for more, chucho?” the figure said. He hadn’t gotten close enough for Cluck to make out his face, but the word he remembered. Chucho. The two syllables called up the feeling of getting kicked in the stomach, his grandfather’s collar coming undone.
Two more figures stepped forward, their silhouettes showing against the trees. Lace’s cousins, the ones from the liquor store.
Now his wings told them he was a Corbeau.
“And you brought your girlfriend this time, huh?” one asked.
If they knew she’d been with a Corbeau, they might kill her, treat her like a fallow deer a wolf had gotten its teeth into.