The Weight of Feathers

The alcohol and sharp floral scent of Nicole Corbeau’s perfume slipped into Lace’s open mouth and needled her throat.

This woman had given her back her face. She’d told Lace about dyeing Eugenie’s hair red, teaching the blonder Corbeaus to coat their feathers in cake flour, showing Violette and Margaux how to bleach their freckles with salt and lemon juice. And now she kept on her way down the hall, taking out her earrings, gliding by the room where one of her sons was beating the other?

Lace waited for Nicole Corbeau to shut herself in her bedroom. Then she put her body back against the door, and listened.

“She’s good,” Cluck said. “She doesn’t even use her fingers. Just brushes, sponges, Q-tips.”

“So she’s a germaphobe,” Dax said. “Wonderful.”

Lace’s fingers worried the doorknob. She thought of opening the door, wondered if that would make things worse for Cluck later.

“You shouldn’t have gone around me.” Lace heard the snap of Dax’s fist on Cluck’s skin.

What was Cluck doing? It didn’t sound like he was fighting back, but he was still talking. He took what Dax did to him, but did not let it make him silent.

“We were screwed,” Cluck said. His words sounded wet, and Lace wondered if there was blood in his mouth. “We needed her.”

“You should have asked me,” Dax said. Again, the sound of Cluck’s back against the wallpaper. “I would’ve given her a shot.”

Lace could almost make out Cluck’s breathing, faint as far-off rain.

“Then give her one,” he said.

She heard a body hitting the floor. Older brother throwing the younger one down against the baseboard.

The guilt knocked around in her, a heavy bead inside a jewelry box, rubbing down the velvet lining.

Dax’s footsteps made the floorboards whine, and Lace ran down the hallway.

She opened the refrigerator and stared in, showing Dax she’d been there all along, of course she hadn’t been listening.

Dax passed her and said nothing.

She turned her head, checking on what she already knew. Dax wasn’t bleeding. His hair looked neat as it had before last night’s show.

Dax slammed the back door, and the window blinds rattled.

Lace took off her scarf, filled it with half a freezer tray of ice, carried it back down the hallway.

Cluck sat on the floor of that room, arms resting on his knees. A dot of blood broke the line of his bottom lip. Sweat stuck his hair to the back of his neck.

Lace stepped through the half-open door. The screech of the hinges made him look up.

She stood over him, offering the scarf full of ice.

He gave her a weak laugh. “Cute.” He took it and held it to his cheek.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Well, I gotta let him win one every now and then. It’s good for morale.”

He didn’t look at her. The flush in his jawline and neck showed his embarrassment. She should’ve gone back to Clémentine’s trailer and pretended she hadn’t heard anything.

Standing over him felt cruel, rubbing it in even if she didn’t mean it that way. So she sat on the floor, a good five feet between them. “What happened?”

He retied the scarf. “Nothing. We were just talking.”

“You were just talking?”

“This is kinda what it looks like when we talk.”

No wonder he hadn’t panicked when her cousins cornered him. He was used to it. His brother could hit him, and his mother wouldn’t look up.

Cluck wasn’t in his family’s show. Whether he’d wanted to be or not, she doubted he’d had the choice. This family called him a name that suited a hen better than a man.

Her mother would tell her she must have a fever to feel sorry for a Corbeau. But this boy had all the mal in him of being a Corbeau when the Corbeaus didn’t even like him.

“Could I ask you something?” she said.

He nodded and rested the back of his head against the wallpaper.

“That night,” she said. “What were you doing out in that part of the woods?”