The Weight of Feathers

Lace stopped at the end of the hall and reached into the fruit bag. She’d bring Nicole Corbeau her one nectarine. Not because she liked her, but because Clémentine had asked her to. Nicole Corbeau may have taught Lace to fix her cheek, but she’d also turned her back on her youngest son, the son who didn’t start fights in fruit markets.

She knocked on the bedroom door. “Nicole?” She listened for the floorboards’ groan.

She knocked harder. The latch gave under Lace’s hand, and clicked undone. The door eased open, hinges squealing.

“Nicole?” Lace said.

The door opened a little more and showed an empty room. Bed neatly made. Doilies centered under lamps. Everything in place but a photo album splayed on the desk.

Lace set the nectarine next to it.

The album’s cover gave off the must of old leather. The two open pages showed the same two people in eight different photos. Nicole Corbeau, her face almost the same, her hair shorter. And a little boy strangers must have called handsome. In one, they both gave the camera their smiles. In another, the boy chased a squirrel across a park, and the woman clapped her hands to her mouth, mid-laugh. Another showed her in a car’s passenger seat, him in the driver’s, small hands pretending to steer.

Lace flipped through the album, backward and forward, and found the same two people a hundred times. The woman clasped the boy’s hands as he got the feel of walking. They held the ugliest poodle Lace had ever seen. They lifted their flour-covered hands toward the camera. Some were just of the boy. Halfway up a tree. Showing off a model airplane.

In the background of a few, there was a second boy. Smaller and darker, hair a little longer and messier, curls brushing his collar. In one, he sat on a patch of far-off grass, hands cupping a feather. In another, he was just a blur of motion, like a comet’s trail. Never in focus. Never a suggestion that Nicole Corbeau knew there was another boy in the frame. This left-handed boy, nothing more than a smudge.

“Do you like the book?” Nicole Corbeau’s voice hit the back of Lace’s neck.

Lace snapped her head toward the door. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to look.”

“Look all you like.” Nicole Corbeau sat on the bed. “If I didn’t want them seen, I wouldn’t leave them lying around.”

“Do you have other ones?” she asked. “Other pictures?”

“Of who? Le petit démon?” Nicole Corbeau laughed, sharp and beautiful as cut crystal.

Lace didn’t need to speak French to understand. Le petit démon. She pulled away from the desk and left the room. “Enjoy your nectarine.”

“For God’s sake, laugh,” Nicole Corbeau called into the hall. “Don’t they have jokes in this town?”

Lace emptied the peaches into the kitchen’s fruit bowl. She left the watermelon on the counter and crumpled the paper bag.

Whoever Cluck and Dax’s father was, Cluck must not have looked enough like him to satisfy Nicole Corbeau. Cluck had that blue-black hair, his olivewood skin, the shape of his eyes. He’d gotten them from his grandfather. They’d stayed hidden in Nicole’s generation, but showed up in Cluck like a photograph developing in solution. Dax, with the lighter brown of his hair and his eyes like haze, must have convinced Nicole that tamping down the Romani blood took only strength of will. He had done it. Cluck hadn’t, and it, along with his left-handedness and the red in his feathers, made his own mother call him le petit démon.

The back door flew open and slammed into the wall.

Dax came in and grabbed Lace’s forearms. “You should’ve stayed out of it.”

She cried out at the feeling of his skin on hers. No sleeves in between. She twisted her arms, trying to pull away. “Let me go.”

He backed her against the counter. “It was none of your business.”

“Was that guy worth a night in jail?” She jerked her head up, finding his eyes. “What were you gonna do? Push him into a stack of cantaloupe crates in front of half the town? How do you think your mother would’ve liked that?”