Dara held on to the edge of the desk.
“This is Dara,” she said. “I think you’re trying to reach my sister. Marie.”
“Oh, dear,” the woman said. “My apologies.”
“My sister shouldn’t be on that deed anymore. Not for five years. And why is she calling you?”
“Ms. Durant, I’m afraid I can’t answer these questions.”
“Transfer of ownership—is that what you said? Transfer to who? A family member can’t just push another off the deed.”
“Ms. Durant,” the woman said, “we can’t get involved in family disputes.”
“That’s my home. My husband and me. Her boyfriend put her up to this. It’s fraud—”
“Ms. Durant, I’m going to hang up now. But you may want to speak to your sister.” The woman paused. “Or your attorney.”
* * *
*
Dara locked herself in the back office and called Charlie, whose voice sounded faint and groggy. He’d been running Nutcracker errands all day in the Chrysler, picking up an extra box of “snow,” the slippery confetti that would dust and swirl and cover the stage every night, and all the dancer’s heads, too, at the end of Act II, the Waltz of the Snowflakes.
“And Marie started all this?” Charlie kept saying, again and again. “She called them?”
“Yes,” Dara said. She thought of the insurance form Derek had hustled past them. “Or she did, without understanding what she was doing. What does Marie know about deeds?”
She could hear Charlie’s throat clicking nervously on the other end.
“I don’t understand,” Charlie said. “Anyone can just file something and take away your own property?”
“Not anyone. She’s still on the deed. We must not have done the paperwork. Putting you on the deed, taking her off.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “I guess I don’t remember.”
Everything had happened so fast, Marie so eager to take their money and run. The world was waiting! Everything became about getting her out of there, getting her the money for her share of the house, getting her shots, getting her passport photo taken at the drugstore, her face in that passport so vibrant, almost manic, smiling with all her teeth but a funny wander of her right eye, like, Are we done yet, are we done because I gotta go, go, go . . . or I’ll never go at all.
But the moment Marie left, Dara marveled at how empty the house felt.
Charlie, she’d said that night at dinner, raising her glass, trying to smile. At last, it’s just we two. Like we wanted, all those years ago.
We didn’t want to be left here, he reminded her. We wanted to leave.
* * *
*
Are you going to talk to her tonight?” Charlie asked when she called again. “I mean, we have to. We . . .”
“We have to,” she said. “After. Later.”
She was thinking of the long hours she would be sitting with Marie at the Ballenger Center that evening. Marie and her vulpine face and her guile and deceit.
“I should be there,” he said. “I’ll come.”
He sounded urgent, warm. She felt close to him for the first time in days and weeks. A tenderness that almost ached.
“Stay there,” Dara said. “We need you upright. We need you.”
Charlie paused. “Okay. We’ll talk when you come home.”
Dara looked at her watch. It was late. So late. But she didn’t want to hang up. She wanted him to reassure her, something.
“Oh,” Charlie said, “I dropped off the snow, so it should be there.”
The snow for the Waltz of the Snowflakes. It came by the crate and it was never enough. And after every performance, parent volunteers, if they were lucky, would sift through it all for the next performance, digging out bobby pins, a stray button, an earring back, all the hazards every dancer faced under their feet. The stage floor had to be pristine, even in a paper snowstorm. A single errant hairpin might bring down a dancer, might take everything away.
But it was worth it, the snow. It was the ahhhhh moment everyone always remembered.
“How’s it look?” she asked, holding the phone against her ear. His voice, hushed and reedy, still soothed her, summoning up safe, warm places.
“Like snow,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “Remember how your mother always kept some, after every performance?”
Dara smiled. “For her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince as a souvenir.”
“Our special secret,” Charlie said, his voice so soft now. “When I was the Prince, she gave it to me.”
* * *
*
It was nearly seven, long past when they were supposed to be at the Ballenger.
She hadn’t laid eyes on Marie in an hour or more. Chlo? Lin told Dara she saw her smoking in the parking lot and talking into her phone.
“She looked funny,” Chlo? said, pulling on her coat.
“Funny how? Be precise.”
But Chlo? only gave her a look of mild panic and would say no more.
Running back to the office, Dara called up the spiral stairs, but there was no answer. She had planned to talk to her on the drive over, or at the theater itself if she had to.
She didn’t know what she would say, but she would do it. Marie would have to answer for her actions. Was she really going to let this monster devour them?
Dara was reaching for her bag when she heard an engine starting outside. Looking out the window, she saw the orange car under the streetlamp, Marie at the wheel, her face so stark and white. Turning the engine, grinding the gears. A stutter start, a brake screech, the car finally lurching forward, Marie’s blond head shuddering behind the windshield.
Marie driving, Dara thought, a pinch in her chest. An old twinge, like when they first learned their jumps, watching Marie throwing herself into the air—turning, turning—for her partner to catch her. A blind turn, a blind leap into safety or the abyss.
Marie shouldn’t be driving.
Marie shouldn’t be out there, alone.
* * *
*
The Ballenger Center was a lit box flickering on the horizon. Like an enormous circus tent promising excitement inside.
Seeing it always reminded her of their father taking them to the traveling carnival that appeared one weekend every year in the parking lot of St. Joan’s. This was when she and Marie were very young and he still did things like that. Darkness would always be just falling and you could see the tents like great bright blobs on the horizon. When they walked past the ticket takers, they gasped because it was all so dazzling, the colorful costumes and the guess-your-weight booth and the ball-and-basket games their father said were a scam even before he sank sixteen dollars into one to win a two-dollar beanie toy for Marie.
There was, always, the sound of eyelash-curling screams coming from the dark ride, Deathbone Alley, where couples disappeared into the shadowy center of an enormous painted mouth lined with glistening silver teeth. Their father did not permit them to go inside.
The sideshow tent was their favorite anyway. Dara favored the Fire Eater, but Marie only had eyes for the Sword Swallower, swinging her golden hair back, in her hands an electrified sword made of glass that lit up her throat. How she threw her head so far back, it seemed to disappear. How she looked like she had no head at all, just throat, gullet.
I could do it, Marie kept saying, trying to shove her whole fist into her mouth. Experimenting for days with paintbrushes and wooden spoons.
Marie, who kept trying until she stuck a kitchen skewer down there, gagged, and threw up blood.
For years, she dreamt of objects caught in her throat: a knitting needle, the back-scratcher their father kept in the side pocket of his recliner.
For years, she’d wake up gasping for air.
* * *
*
Marie loved the Sword Swallower, but Dara loved the Fire Eater.
Flinging her head back, that curtain of black hair, tongue stuck out wide and flat, setting the wick of the torch on its pink center, her mouth forming an O.