Charlie sat, silently writing checks at the desk, an odd look on his face, like he was thinking of things but wouldn’t say them.
It was surprising, really. All of it. The lunch, the production of it, even that Marie had chosen to tell Charlie about it first. Rather than Dara.
“Is that why you were so late?” Dara asked. “Couldn’t pick your lobster?”
Marie turned and looked at Dara.
“And then you know what we did, Charlie?” she said, her eyes still on Dara. “We went to a luxury showroom and looked at cars.”
“Cars?” Charlie said, looking up. “Why?”
“I think I might need one,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous,” Dara said. “You live where you work. You need a car to come down the stairs in the morning?”
“If you need to go anywhere,” Charlie said, “you can take the Chrysler.”
“You barely know how to drive, Marie,” Dara said. “Remember?”
“Well,” Marie said, her face changing, that fox look it could sometimes get, “I didn’t know a lot of things until I did.”
Dara looked at her, feeling a chill.
* * *
*
As Dara walked away, she could hear Marie returning to her conversation with Charlie. Charlie, pondering the stack of mail in front of him. Charlie looking far-off, unreachable.
“Big, snazzy cars,” Marie was saying. “They give you champagne while you browse. You can sit behind the wheel.” Then, her voice softer, “They all smelled like Dad.”
* * *
*
Whatever had seemed to be turning now seemed turned. Marie and the contractor. They were a thing, together. And it was changing things. Derek’s new cockiness, cock of the walk. Marie dyeing her hair, wearing a skirt, looking at snazzy cars. Marie flagrant and unrepentant, fornicating on the floor above while her seven-year-old students waited below.
“So, what did you talk about at this lunch today? Power tools?” Dara asked, unable to stop herself from returning to the doorway. “Spray tans?”
But Marie, standing behind Charlie seated at the desk, didn’t say a word. And that fox look coming back to her face as she snaked her arm down past Charlie’s cheek and neck and into his shirt pocket, pulling a cigarette from the pack snug there.
Sliding it into her mouth like some kind of femme fatale, disappearing into Studio A, the click of a lighter, a cloud of smoke trailing behind her.
* * *
*
That evening, Marie climbed in Derek’s big oil-slick truck and headed off to parts unknown. Together they went, both in their leather jackets like a motorcycle gang, off into the sunlight, and Dara knew now that something had changed. Marie had shut her out. This was the new stage.
* * *
*
The next morning, her fears were confirmed.
She’d arrived at the studio before seven and he was tumbling down the spiral stairs from Marie’s lair, his hair still gleaming from the stand-up shower, his breath mints blasting—it made her sick.
His smell, his cleanness made her sick.
She so preferred the smells of the studio—sweat and feet and tiger balm, the musk of feet and boys’ crotches and the occasional whiff of ammonia from the little ones, their tights stinging with urine—and the smells of the house, their home—camphor and tea and wet plaster and the burnt furnace stench and, still, in every carpet fiber, every pine whorl, their mother’s scent. Perfume and desperation.
“Morning, sis,” he said, bolder than ever.
“I’m not your sister,” Dara said.
“I guess no one has a chance, do they?”
“Pardon?”
“You three,” he said, his voice wet from sleep, “thick as thieves.”
He was standing before her now, coffee cup half crushed in his big meaty hand.
“I’m busy,” Dara said, on hold with the insurance company, trying to get some answers about their claim payment.
“Hey, I get it. Family is everything,” he said, leaning against the jamb. “Marie explained.”
Explained? Dara thought. What does that mean? And she didn’t like the way he was watching her. It felt like he was poking her with his manicured fingers.
What kind of man gets a manicure, she’d said to Marie.
A man who cares about where he puts his hands, Marie had replied.
“I’m busy,” Dara repeated abruptly. “Do you mind?”
He took a sip from his coffee cup and made no move to leave.
“You all used to live together, right? In that big old spookhouse on Sycamore?”
There was something strange about the phrasing of it. Live together. Or maybe it was just the way he said it, sotto voce, like a sly secret.
“We grew up there,” Dara said. “Is this about the house again? Because—”
“You and Marie. You two grew up there.”
“And Charlie.”
“You know, when I first got here, I couldn’t tell. Is Charlie your husband,” he said, tossing his cup in the trash, “or your brother?”
Dara looked at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“I’m just curious,” he said. “It’s kind of unusual. Two sisters, one husband. How’s the math work there?”
She didn’t like the way he was watching her.
“For years,” he said, tilting his head, resting it on the door jamb, “the three of you playing house. Kinda an odd setup. Non-traditional, if you will.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
“So close. So private,” he said. “I guess it worked until it didn’t.”
Dara stood up, began moving.
“Your sister told me about it.” He paused a second, looking at Dara, waiting for something. “She told me you wanted her to leave.”
Dara’s mouth opened, then closed.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. Feeling dizzy all of a sudden, the smack of Derek’s aftershave.
“No,” she repeated, stepping backward, uneasy on her feet. “I didn’t want her to leave. And she didn’t leave.” Then, more softly, “She abandoned us.”
FOXY
She told me you wanted her to leave.
All day it buzzed in Dara’s brain. Was he lying, bluffing? Or was Marie, foxy Marie?
Dara stood in her studio, hands clawed around her tea mug, calling out commands to her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince—Lengthen the spine, don’t tuck. Lengthen the neck and lower the shoulders. Turn the head without tilting. Bailey. Bailey. Bailey, attendu!—but all she could think of was Marie.
She thought about calling Charlie, who was over at the Ballenger Center meeting with Madame Sylvie, but she didn’t know what she would say. She wasn’t sure she could make him understand.
Later that day, the rain-heavy gutter in the front of the building gave way, tumbling dead leaves, twigs, mud, to the parking lot below, spattering three exiting students in ballerina pink.
Later, Gaspar found a dead bat among the debris, wings splayed. It had gotten caught, snared.
* * *
*
In Studio A, she found Marie stretched on the floor, her arms above her head, her barely-breasts disappearing into her bony chest.
Dara stood above her, her hands drifting down to her own breastbone, feeling the hard chop of her rib cage. Their strange, strange bodies. All the heat and fire was in the feet, stamped and lined and mangled and engorged. . . .
“Why did you talk to him about us?” Dara said, her feet near Marie’s head. “Why?”
Marie looked up at Dara but didn’t say anything. That cool blond hair of hers—the talk of the studio for days after—was already starting to look strangely green, frayed.
“Derek. Why did you tell him personal things?”
“What things?”
“About your moving out of the house. He said you told him I wanted you to leave.”
The corners of Marie’s mouth seemed to lift ever so slightly, a ghost smile.
“I didn’t tell him that,” she said. “That’s not what I told him.”
Now Dara couldn’t stop, an awful feeling in her chest.
“And about the way we lived,” she said, stumbling over the words.
“What about the way we lived, Dara?” Marie said, looking up at Dara, her palms across her breasts. Her eyes vacant, guileless.
Dara paused, watching her sister. Was it her sister, even. This creature possessed.