“It’ll run its course,” Charlie said again, resting his head on his hand. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Dara still didn’t say anything, just let him go on, the sulfur thick between them.
“He has to finish that renovation sometime,” Charlie was saying now. “The floor is gone.”
The floor is gone, Dara thought.
* * *
*
She’s already got one family member keeping close watch,” he said as they stepped outside, the late October air sharp, stinging. “She doesn’t need another.”
* * *
*
When they arrived at the studio, the stairwell was choked, Benny and Gaspar heaving enormous sprung floor panels up the steps, great maple hardwood bands to be woven together like a basket.
Dara lowered her head and moved quickly, bracing herself to see him, to have to pass through Studio B, a temporary path made of narrow mats strewn over the old subfloor.
But Derek, it turned out, was nowhere to be found and her sister was hungover, sprawled on the floor of Studio A, drinking coconut water from a box, squeezing it until nothing was left.
“What’s wrong?” Dara asked, because it was so clear Marie was dying to be asked, nearly reaching for Dara’s ankle as she walked past.
“I called him all night,” she said. “He never called me back.”
“Did you try his beeper?” Dara said. “Or his other beeper?” Charlie gave her a scolding look and continued on into the back office.
Marie looked up and Dara saw her eyes were pink, swollen, like wet buds.
Pathetic, Dara thought, a coldness settling in her. This was all too much to ask. Too much. Why did everything Marie do have to be so big, so all-consuming? Look at me! Look at me!
As if on cue, the grumble of a truck came from outside.
Marie jumped to her feet, tossing the coconut water into the trash. Smoothing her hair back. Heading for the window like an excitable bird. Like a desperate thing.
“It’s not . . .” she said, peering out the window, her fingers pressed on the cloudy glass. “It’s just the delivery man.”
“You’re humiliating yourself,” Dara said, moving toward the back office, seeing Charlie there, giving her another look.
“I don’t care.”
“You’re humiliating us.”
But Marie didn’t say anything, her head down. Her thoughts remote, mysterious.
* * *
*
Dara couldn’t help finding a sneaking pleasure in it. In Derek standing her up, abandoning her. Missing a late-night rendezvous with a very drunk Marie, her bruises ready for re-bruising. Aching for it.
Maybe he had other girlfriends. No wedding band, but that didn’t mean there weren’t girlfriends. Maybe a live-in one, or even a common-law wife, who knew. Men like that, who knew.
And when Derek eventually showed up for work, hours later, mirrored sunglasses on, like a cop, and looking distracted, it was even more satisfying to see him stroll right to Benny and Gaspar, to never make it to Studio A at all, to Marie, who stood in the doorway, her five-year-olds clustered behind her like a pile of downy dandelion heads.
Maybe, Dara thought, Charlie was right, after all.
Maybe it will pass.
* * *
*
Clatter, clatter, the silver-sprayed swords unsheathed for the mice.
In Studio C, Dara was walking students through The Nutcracker’s fight scene, Clara’s battle with the Mouse King and his furry legion.
But the thud-thud-thudding from Studio B didn’t stop, and three times the lights flickered, the circuits strained from all the power tools.
“Madame Durant,” Bailey Bloom was saying, as five “mice” surrounded her, batting her, swatting her like a pi?ata, nearly pressing her jonquil body into the corner, trapping her, indeed, like a rat. “When do I get to throw my slipper at the Mouse King?”
“No swordplay,” Dara called out to the aggressive mice. “You’re not there yet.”
Szzzzzt. The lights flickered above and then dimmed to brown.
“Taking care of it,” Charlie said, emerging from the back office, one hand on his ailing back, and moving quickly to Studio B.
Dara looked around at the students all staring at her in the semi-darkness, hands wrapped around the cardboard swords, four of them drooping, one bent from being packed hastily after last year’s production.
“Madame Durant, when do we get to do it with the mouse heads?” peeped Carly Mendel, her brow pinched. “Because I heard they make it hard to breathe.”
There was a clamor of voices from Studio B, Charlie’s low tones and Gaspar’s hurried apologies, and the whir of Benny rushing past to the circuit box.
Finally, the lights rose again and Charlie left for the hardware store to buy a new fuse, or maybe just to leave, to have some respite. Dara could hardly blame him.
“Vite, vite,” Dara called out, quickly directing the Mouse King, Oliver Perez, his sword the largest but its tip creased and bent, to the center of the space for his dramatic fall after Clara hurls her slipper at him. “Take your positions.”
“Madame Durant,” Bailey said and Dara turned, exasperated.
“What now?”
Bailey pointed to the doorway, where a trio of seven-year-olds stood, clutching one another, shaken by the gravity of stepping over the threshold into Studio C, the older-girl studio, the forbidden space for which they longed.
“Why aren’t you in class?” Dara asked them. “You three should be in Studio A with Mademoiselle Durant.”
The seven-year-olds looked at one another before pushing forth the tallest one, a bowlegged girl whose name Dara couldn’t recall.
“But, Madame,” she lisped, her arms interlocked with the girl beside her, “where is Mademoiselle Durant?”
* * *
*
Dara pushed past the students entering for her three o’clock class. Pushed into Studio B, through the plastic curtain, which tangled her arm.
Benny and Gaspar looked up, surprised, a pneumatic tool of some kind shuddering in Benny’s hand, both their faces covered in masks.
“Where is he?” Dara asked. “Your boss.”
But Benny only gestured at his ear guards helplessly and Gaspar looked away.
* * *
*
She wouldn’t dare, Dara thought, her head tilting up to the third floor. She wouldn’t.
* * *
*
Running back through Studio A, past her whispering, eager pupils, Dara took long breaths. She pushed into the empty back office and pinned her hand on the railing of the spiral staircase that led upstairs. One foot on its bottom step. But she could feel it. The iron rail vibrating, its steps vibrating, slithering up to the third floor, where her sister was fucking the afternoon away with this stranger in their mother’s private-most space.
* * *
*
Ms. Durant, we need to talk.”
It was only moments later, and Dara pretended to not quite hear Dr. Weston, keeping her gaze on her students across the room, warming up in what seemed an appallingly lazy manner.
Upstairs, she could hear Marie moving, could hear her little cat feet.
“Ms. Durant.” Dr. Weston lowered his voice discreetly. “I can’t be the only one concerned about what’s going on in there.”
Dara pursed her lips, her eyes on Chlo? Lin’s sickled foot.
“Mademoiselle Lin,” she called out, poker-faced, “inside of your heel forward, s’il vous plait. Do not give me ugly feet.”
Inside, her mind raced. Had Dr. Weston heard? Had one or more parents—and they all talked, ceaselessly in that gossip nest of a waiting room—spotted Marie and Derek together? Caught them in one of their slippery and grotesque ruttings.
That would be the end of it, of course. The school, everything.
“Ms. Durant,” Dr. Weston said again, his neediness so insistent, so abrasive.
Putting on her parent face, Dara turned to him at last.
“Dr. Weston,” she said quietly, moving closer to him, “now is not the time.”
In her head, she was frantically conjuring excuses. (My sister’s become deranged, she’s having a psychotic break . . .)
“But tomorrow’s November first!” Dr. Weston said, more loudly now, a sheen of sweat on his brow.
“Pardon?”