The Weight of Feathers

Lace had exchanged few words with Cluck’s grandfather. The night she’d started with the show, Eugenie had introduced her to Alain Corbeau, who’d made a “Hmm” sound that was not quite a greeting but not quite disapproval either.

The strings of globe lights hadn’t shown how much Cluck took after him. But now, with daylight filling this room, she would’ve bet her new tail that Cluck would look just like him in fifty years. They both had the same tint to their forearms, brown, but not like Lace’s family. That brown had the gray thread of an ashwood tree, more silver than olive.

Both had that same dark hair too, worn a little long. Gray streaks lightened the old man’s, but he still had plenty of black left.

The old man lowered the handkerchief from his mouth. The linen came away blood-speckled, like the flecks of brown on a robin’s egg.

The difference between Cluck and the old man was more than age. It was the way, when the old man realized Lace was there, his eyes caught the light a little more sharply.

“Are you okay?” Lace asked.

“This is the last time I let my daughter give me one of her sleeping pills,” he said. “This morning I was so foggy I tried to brush my teeth with my razor.” He forced a smile. It started out kind, then twisted, wry and wary, when Lace didn’t return it.

Mixing up his razor and his toothbrush. It was so strange she almost believed it. But he’d made a little too much of a point of showing the blood-dotted handkerchief while he said it. For how unimportant she was, he cared a little too much about her taking his explanation as truth.

“And you?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

“I do the makeup now,” she said.

“I know what you do. Why are you doing it here?”

His eyes drifted toward the feather burn on her arm. She’d covered it the same way Nicole Corbeau had taught her to do her face, layers of foundation and powder as thin as the dried husks of tomatillos.

To anyone except Lace, it wasn’t there. But the old man studied the patch on her arm like he could see it.

He knew.

He met her eyes. She read the bargain in his face, the offer, an exchange of silences. Don’t tell, and I won’t tell.

She shut the door and pressed her back to the hallway wall. The sound of his coughing stabbed into her forehead. Maybe this man was the Corbeaus’ version of her father, skeptical of las supersticiones. As long as she didn’t make trouble for him, he’d let her stay.

If she told, she’d lose any chance of getting the scar lifted, along with this small, feathered thing growing between her and the boy called Cluck.

But the sound of the kitchen faucet came back to her, this time with the things Cluck had said about his clothes. They’d belonged to this man, coughing a mist of blood into his handkerchief. This man Cluck wanted to be like so badly he wore collared shirts in the heat of a Central Valley summer, hoping the invisible things that made his grandfather who he was would rub off like a scent.

If Cluck could lose him, he needed to know.

Lace heard Cluck’s voice upstairs. She stood in the front of the wooden staircase and looked up at the second floor. She could’ve called his name, but then Cluck’s grandfather would hear her. He could tell her secret in a few words. The Corbeaus would trap her in this house, and she’d never have the chance to tell Cluck that his grandfather had a secret of his own.

She took a breath in and ran up the stairs, quick as las sirenas slid into a cold river.

The second floor barely looked different from the first. A few closed doors. A few open. An unscreened window at the end of the hall. But even with the hardwood under her feet, she felt the distance to the ground. The third and fourth floors of motels had never bothered her, but here, she was sure a coin tossed out a window would fall forever. This house may not have belonged to the Corbeaus, but by renting and staying in it they’d filled it with their reckless love of heights. They made their living by not fearing falling.