Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

“I’m writing you a script.” The doctor tore off the sheet and held it out to Pépère . “For antibiotics. The way you’ve weakened your lungs, they can’t fight off infection the way we’d like.”

Pépère wouldn’t take the prescription. He pretended not to see the paper flapping in the man’s hand.

Cluck reached over for it. “Thank you.”

The doctor left.

“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Cluck told his grandfather.

Pépère rolled down his shirtsleeves. “Where are you going?”

“To apologize for you.” Cluck followed the doctor into the hallway. “Do you have a minute?”

The doctor looked up from a chart.

Cluck checked the hallway, in case his words might bring out a risk manager. “What about the accident? Could that have anything to do with it?”

The doctor hesitated, his mouth half-open.

“Please,” Cluck said. “I just want to know.”

The doctor lowered his voice. “With what the smoking’s already done to his lungs, and now with everything that might or might not be floating around in the air…”

“Might or might not?” Cluck asked.

“They won’t tell us anything. We know there was some kind of ECA or MCA, but we don’t know what else. They’re calling it ‘trade secrets.’ That means there’s only so much we can do.”

Cluck’s eyes stuck on the hallway carpet.

“But it means the same thing,” the doctor said. “He’s probably a lot more open to infection than he would be.”

Cluck folded the prescription paper. “So get him to take the pills?” he asked.

The doctor nodded. “Get him to take the pills.”

Bonne chance; il en aurait besoin. Cluck would have to crush them up and ask Clémentine to slip them into his food.

De la vista, nace el amor.

From what you see, you love.

Cluck had told Lace that he and his grandfather wouldn’t be back until late. But now she heard the Morris Cowley’s tires crunching the leaves, an hour earlier than she’d expected.

The truck parked outside. Alain Corbeau would have told Cluck by now. They would come for her.

She got the trailer’s back window open, ready to climb out into the dark, a borrowed kitchen knife in her hand. But Cluck and the old man’s steps led away from the trailers. Away from the yellow Shasta.

If she wasn’t gone by the time they came back, they’d kill her. The Paloma among the Corbeaus. When she was little she had nightmares about them all turning to crows, the spears of their beaks poking a thousand holes in her.

She pressed her suitcase shut.

The door flew open, and Eugenie stumbled in.

Lace’s ribs felt sharp, jabbing at her lungs. She backed toward the trailer wall, gripping the suitcase and the kitchen knife. She could knock Eugenie down with one swing of that suitcase. Anyone else she’d wave the knife at.

Clémentine appeared in the doorway, still in a show dress like Eugenie. Only their wings were off. Wouldn’t they want them on to kill her? Wouldn’t they want the last thing she saw to be the cover of those enormous wings?

“What are you doing?” Clémentine asked.

They hadn’t turned to crows. No black feathers sprouted from their arms. They looked at her not like they planned to kill her and scavenge her body, but like they’d caught her undressing.

They didn’t know. The old man hadn’t told him.

“I think I broke the lock,” Lace said. “I’m trying to get it open.”

“With a steak knife? You’ll kill yourself.” Clémentine pulled a pin from her hair. “Here.”

Lace set the suitcase down and pretended to fiddle with the lock.

“What’s the matter?” Eugenie asked.

Lace turned the suitcase so they couldn’t see the lock, and kept moving the hairpin. Her heart felt squeezed tight, giving off blood like juice from a plum. Maybe the old man had told only Cluck, and would leave her to him.

“I shouldn’t have said anything about Alain,” Lace said.

Clémentine sat on the built-in bed. “Alain Corbeau’s an old mule. If he felt a heart attack coming on, he’d say he was too busy, could it come back next week.”

Lace jerked the hairpin like it had done the trick. “Thank you.” She handed it back to Clémentine.

Eugenie hopped up on a counter. “If it makes you feel better, he’s angrier with Cluck than he is with you.”

Lace dropped her shoulders, the tension swimming down her back. Maybe Alain Corbeau hadn’t told Cluck. But his stare told her it was not her place to interfere. Entre dos muelas cordales nunca pongas tus pulgares, her uncles would say. Don’t put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth.

The old man’s face would never tell her anything. She wanted to look at Cluck and find out what he knew.

“Where’s Cluck?” Lace asked.

“He’s at his tree,” Eugenie said.

“His tree?”

Clémentine swiped a cotton pad over her face, rubbing off her eye makeup. “Every place we stop, he has his tree.”

Eugenie gave Lace vague directions to the cottonwood. But Lace did not go there first. She found Cluck’s grandfather leaning against the Morris Cowley, a half-burned-down cigarette between his fingers.

He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m trying to quit.”

He hummed a quick laugh and put the pack away.

She wanted to ask why he hadn’t told Cluck who she was, but bit back the question in case she’d been wrong. If Alain Corbeau hadn’t recognized the Paloma in her, hadn’t seen the feather on her arm, she wasn’t telling.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But Cluck had to know.”

“It made the boy feel better,” the old man said. “And it was nothing to me. Doctors are les crétins . They can’t make me do what I don’t care to.”

The end of his cigarette glowed against the dark, a flake off a harvest moon.

Lace tried not to touch the burn on her cheek. “You used to work at the plant?” she asked.

“Years ago.” He put out his cigarette and went inside.

Lace followed the clean, honey scent of wild roses through the trees. It drifted over the old campground, heavier and sweeter at night, like gardenia.

She spotted the white of Cluck’s shirt and the pale soles of his bare feet, moon-brightened. In the dark, they were all of him that stood out. The black of his hair, his dark trousers, the light brown of his face and hands faded into the tree.

“Well.” He saw her and climbed down, hands and feet gripping the branches. “If it isn’t the only person my grandfather likes less than me right now.”

“That’s not how Eugenie tells it,” she said.

Cluck got down from the lowest bough. “She’s probably right.” He gave her a worn-out smile.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just angry.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t take care of himself. Never has.”

She set her hand on the trunk and looked up. “How do you climb without shoes?”

“I’m not sure I could climb with shoes. I’ve been doing it without since I was five.”

“What do you do up that high?”

“I just like being up there. It’s quiet.”

No one in her family liked heights. They’d never understood why anyone put themselves somewhere they could fall from. But now she wondered if being up high was a little bit like swimming, when the shelf of a lakeshore dropped out to the water’s full depth. The light thinned out before it reached the bottom. The distance to the lake bed felt endless as the night sky.

The difference was gravity. There was no falling to the lake bed. If she stopped swimming, she drifted toward the light.