There was a big party before she left—all the studio parents came, and the former students now grown—and Marie drank a bottle of champagne herself and ended up kissing one of Dara’s former students in the pantry, a twenty-year-old boy with a dashing blond forelock, and generally causing mayhem before collapsing in tears at the kitchen table after everyone had left. Charlie put her to bed, laid a cold washcloth on her face, a trash basket nearby in case.
She’s not going, Charlie told Dara. You’ll see.
* * *
*
But Marie did go, dragging their mother’s rolling trunk behind her.
“First stop, Greeeece!” That’s what the first postcard said, a week later.
The second one, from Rome, came a week after that and had only a few words scrawled across: “BEING GOOD. LOVE TO MY DARLINGS.”
There was no third one and, twenty-five days after she left, they woke to the sound of Marie’s battered feet pittering along the upstairs hallway, a duty-free bag with a half-eaten box of mandoles and three cans of halva ringed around her wrist. Their mother’s velvet trunk abandoned at the foot of the stairs, its wheels now stripped.
I had it all wrong, she said, clinging to Dara in bed that night, the two of them twinning, making Marie feel safe. I thought the voices inside were saying to go, go, go!
And what, Dara asked, did they really say?
They said don’t listen to the voices, Marie said and laughed, laughed so hard that she shook in Dara’s hands, in her arms, Dara holding her, this little bird, its beak sharp and cries small.
We’re glad you’re home, said Charlie, who always knew what to say and said it, his eyes glassy and relieved, Marie clambering into his arms, staying there.
That night, they piled together in the master bed like they’d always done when their mother was still alive, like on the final nights of The Nutcracker.
They snuggled against one another, one hand over another’s foot, a tickle to the ribs, a smoothing of one’s hair. Charlie loved to stroke their hair, one hand on each mane.
What, Dara thought, could anyone find in that other than love?
They loved Marie. They had helped her. They owned the house, but it was hers to live in. Forever if she liked. Except she didn’t like it, in the end. She’d left again, abandoned them. But what if, suddenly, she might want it back? Because he did.
THE SETUP
It was the blue of four a.m., the furnace clanging.
Dara couldn’t sleep and had embarked on a Nutcracker task that meant digging through the creasy, mold-thick boxes in the basement, tripping over the heavy, pungent carton with their father’s old hockey equipment, warped wooden sticks, faded jerseys still stiff with years of sweat.
Nearly tripping over an old banker’s box, she found her foot landing in damp hair and almost cried out. But it was only their mother’s old rabbit fur blanket, crawling loose from a soggy wardrobe box tipped on its side.
She paused. She had no memory of putting it down here. Had Marie? She bent down to reach for it, its smell cloying, both familiar and forgotten.
Their mother had many holiday traditions: sprinkling holy water on the barre before the first new class, stringing popcorn-and-cranberry garlands before Midnight Mass, and eating milk bread with sugar in bed if you were sick.
But their favorite took place every year after the final performance of The Nutcracker.
The end of such a grueling haul, a dozen performances or more, every year more substantial parts for Dara and Marie, moving from mice and party guests to harlequins and flowers. Neither ever played Clara because that wouldn’t be fair, their mother said.
(It wouldn’t be good business, Dara later realized.)
Eleven, twelve o’clock at night and their father invariably on the road or asleep in his lounger downstairs, monster movies flickering on the TV, they returned from the Ballenger Center, tiptoeing through the house, following their mother to the master bedroom, unpeeling themselves, unsticking themselves, their eyes raccoon black, their feet full of masses, their color high.
Black nails, purpling skin, flesh stippled. Sore legs sunk in ice or cracked feet dunked in mouthwash, arnica slathered, then cling-wrap tight around throbbing muscles.
No more stuffy mice suits, no more crawling under Mother Ginger’s hoop skirt!
No more fake snow in my mouth, up my nose!
No more simpering Clara and her teary face!
And they’d curl up in their mother’s bed and drink warm eggnog heated gently over the stove, and watch videotapes of old Nutcrackers on the tiny portable black-and-white. The last one would always be their mother herself as Clara, age twelve, in the Alberta Ballet’s beloved Nutcracker season.
And their mother would bring out that fur blanket, the one Dara had just found—wet and musky—on the basement floor. She’d remove it from her velvet trunk and tell them it had once been her own mother’s and was made from the fur of genuine Vienna Blue rabbits.
The blanket came out only once a year and smelled like lavender and olden days and felt on your fingers like the inside of a bunny ear. Dara could feel it now, how it felt then. Plush and electric, kicking off sparks.
Snuggling underneath it, drinking eggnog and laughing and tussling legs against one another and their eyes always still dusted with snow from the performance, it was their favorite night of the year, every year.
When Charlie came into their lives, he became part of it too. He carried the tray with the eggnog in the red reindeer goblets from the kitchen to the bedroom, never spilling a drop.
That very first year it was strange, maybe. But then it never was again.
Here was Charlie, a very shy thirteen with his Adam’s apple conscious on such an impossibly long neck, anxiously swinging his impossibly long arms.
Their mother lifting the edge of the blanket and inviting Charlie in.
Their mother’s raising it with such flourish, the white of her arm against the blue of the fur. The fur electric and irresistible, her eyes trained on Charlie.
Come in, come in, come in.
* * *
*
At last, Dara found the box she was looking for, the one with NUTCRACKER (OLD) written on the side in their mother’s familiar scrawl.
Inside was their rotting papier-maché Nutcracker head, the one they’d used for a dozen or more years of performances, every Nutcracker Prince sliding it over his boyish head.
In recent years, they’d turned to a newer one, its shellac chipping after only a dozen performances, its quality suspect. I will find the original one, le vrai bonheur, Dara had promised Corbin Lesterio.
Looking at it now, she thought of how happy he would be.
Distracted, she was hurrying for the stairs, the papier-maché head over her raised fist, when she nearly tripped on that fur blanket again, her foot sinking into it, warm with mold.
Her stomach turned.
Hurriedly, she kicked it away, to the far corner by the wheezing furnace.
* * *
*
At the living-room window, she examined the Nutcracker head in the early morning light. It wasn’t as she remembered at all, its skull sunken slightly, dented on one side, its smell of dried paste, the fading red of his hat, the features on his face dulling, the twirling mustache rubbed away, the mesh over one eye torn.
But his bared-teeth grin loomed just as large. When the Prince turned his head for the first time, flashing that grin, it always sent all the little children in the theater hiding under their seats.
She supposed it was like all children’s stories, all fairy tales—always much darker, stranger than you guessed. Children themselves much darker, stranger than you guessed.
That was when she thought she saw something through the front windows, smeary with morning mist.
An orange flare, like maybe the neighbor burning leaves in his trash can again. But, moving closer, her hands curling around the Nutcracker head, she saw it was that car, Marie’s, its orange even more so amid the grim morning, the orange of an Elmer’s glue top.
“Marie . . .” she said aloud, her right hand reached out to the fogged window as if her sister could hear her. Is she coming home, is she . . .
There was an awful feeling in her chest, and before she could name it, the idling car leapt to life again.
As it hurtled past, into the morning mist, she saw him. She saw Derek behind the wheel. Derek alone.
* * *